Peptide synthesis technology

A Swedish start-up purchased the rights to a potentially disruptive technology for peptide synthesis (solid phase), using continuous instead of batch by batch synthesis. I was invited to review the technology, and proposed a project for building simple prototypes for proving the basic principles followed by more complex systems for testing the commercial performance of the system. I became project leader and specified a new design for the system, overseeing details for all the mechanical aspects, and myself designing the electrical/electronics systems and writing the control software necessary for the technology to be demonstrated. I also designed the experiments, working with chemists to specify the optimal conditions and so on. The technology was build and demonstrated with very limited resources, very successfully: technical performance is comparable with the highly optimised incumbent technology. (I was also very involved in the commercial aspects.) The technology has been presented twice in public at trade conferences, garnering great interest - the commercial exploitation is under consideration.

Medical device performance

A start-up developing a novel medical “autoinjector” design, was struggling to consistently develop devices giving the correct delivery performance (injection time, in particular), essentially using trial and error. I showed analytically how the delivered performance depended on factors including the spring parameters, the needle dimensions, drug parameters, friction and other factors, and developed a model that has allowed the required performance to be designed on the “drawing board”. Final performance of designs made using the model have agreed very closely with prediction, drastically reducing the amount of trial and error required during prototype testing.

A more challenging problem came along when a candidate drug turned out to be highly non-Newtonian, rendering delivery performance counter-intuitive and delivery hard to control. A literature search threw up little prior work on this problem; previous consultants had failed to develop an autoinjector for the drug. I developed new mathematical models for this situation and experimentally parametised the drug’s characteristics, allowing the performance to be very accurately predicted. I also led the development of a successful new autoinjector architecture able to deal with this type of drug, to the technical satisfaction of the Pharma company client.

(I also have modelled gas transfer through drug containers, studied extractables and leachables for different polymers, and done much other fundamental science relating to autoinjectors. An image below [taken from Wikipedia and “free to use”] shows components of a typical autoinjector but, for confidentiality reasons, not one have worked on.)

Novel gas metering technology

The advent of smart metering with electronic data gathering has recently made a strong incentive to develop inherently electrical measurements of gas for domestic metering (as well as for electricity and water metering). Several proposals had been made historically for fiscal gas metering using low frequency acoustic time of flight measurement, but no-one had previously managed to meet the accuracy requirements (around 2% of reading, over a flow range of over 150:1, meaning an accuracy at low flows of around a 0.01% of the maximum flow). (Using low frequencies allows the use of mass produced audio components; ultrasonic gas metering is well established but the electronics and sensors are expensive.)

I took a “back of the envelope” concept for a novel method of achieving this, computed the theoretical performance required from the elements and developed the necessary algorithms for determining gas flow from recorded signals. I led the manufacture of a series of prototype devices, and demonstrated that the best of these was able to meet the performance requirements for fiscal gas metering. The final device is roughly price competitive with incumbent technology, but has not yet gained commercial traction in a conservative industry.