Drug manufacturing that's out of this world






As long-duration space travel and extraterrestrial habitation becomes a potential reality, it's important to find ways to synthesise chemicals for drugs, food, fuels, and other products in space that may be important for those missions, says Zaiput co-founder and CEO Andrea Adamo SM '03, who co-invented the separator in the lab of Klavs Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Notably, Zaiput's separator, called SEP-10, separates liquids without the need for gravity, which is a trademark of traditional methods.

''When people go on deep space explorations, or maybe to Mars, these are multiyear missions,'' Adamo says. ''But how do you synthesise chemicals for drugs and other products without gravity? We have that answer. Testing our unit in space will show that what we have done on Earth is fully exportable to space.''

Results from the ISS experiments will prove that the device indeed functions in zero-gravity, which is basically impossible to verify on Earth. And, they will help the startup refine the device, Adamo says: ''MIT strives for excellence and we inherited that model - we're still striving for excellence.''

Surface forces





''If you want to use this for a continuous operation in a reliable way, you have to carefully control pressure conditions across membranes,'' Adamo says. ''You want a little bit of pressure, so the chemical goes through, but not too much to push through the unwanted liquid. The internal controller ensures this happens at all times.''


For chemical extraction, a ''feed'' liquid that contains a target chemical for extraction and a ''solvent'' - which is incapable of mixing with the feed liquid - are combined in a tube that flows toward the separation device.



Importantly, Adamo says, Zaiput's continuous-flow, membrane-based separator allows for separation of emulsions, whereby small droplets of one liquid end up in the other liquid, never fully separating.

''We don't have that issue, because we don't need to wait for liquids to settle,'' Adamo says. ''We are the only technology that provides continuous separation, can readily separate emulsions, and is also designed for safety, so if you're dealing with explosive or toxic substances, you can process them quickly.''

Beautifying and scaling up

Adamo came to MIT in the early 2000s as a civil engineer. Conducting research at MIT and being exposed to the Institute's entrepreneurial ecosystem, however, ''changed my horizons,'' he says. ''I wanted to be in a field where I could bring technology to the world through a startup.''


Inspired by Jensen's previous research into surface forces, Adamo began designing a small, membrane-based separation device equipped with a precise pressure controller that maintained exact conditions for separation. This first prototype consisted of two bulky plastic pieces bolted together. ''It was really ugly,'' Adamo says.

But showcasing the prototype to colleagues at MIT, he found that despite its unaesthetic appearance, the device had commercial potential. ''The innovation was not just good for the lab, but also for general public,'' he says. ''I started looking into business propositions.'' (So far, the research has also produced two papers co-authored by Jensen, Adamo, and other MIT researchers in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.)

In 2013, Adamo co-founded Zaiput with partner and Harvard University biochemist Jennifer Baltz, now Zaiput's chief operating officer, with help from MIT's Venture Mentoring Service and other MIT services.


''Customers visit labs and these devices pop out,'' Adamo says. ''Function is key, but when you take an object in your hands, it has to feel nice. It has to be pleasing to the eye and, in a commercial sense, distinctive.''

Currently, Zaiput is developing a production-scale device with a flow rate of 3,000 milliliters per minute, for larger-scale drug manufacturing. The startup is also hoping to more efficiently tackle very complex chemical extractions.

Today, this involves repeating chemical extraction processes multiple times in massive columns, about 100 feet high, to ensure as much of the target chemical has been extracted from a liquid. But Zaiput hopes it can do the same with a small system of combined modular units. Additionally, the startup hopes to bring the device to traditional batch-separation users, notably those who still work with settling tanks.

''The next challenges are bigger-scale development, more complex extraction, and reaching out to traditional users to empower them with new technologies,'' Adamo says.