May 6, 2002, 2002 ACS National Meeting
November 14, 2000 2000 Charles M. A. Stine Award
June 5, 2000 Dupont-MIT Alliance
Polyelectrolyte Multilayers
(May 6, 2002 C&E News)
Thin-film properties can be finely tuned through layer-by-layer assemblyMichael Freemantle
C&EN London
excerpt... (for full article, click here)
Rubner's group has shown, for example, that polyelectrolyte multilayered films of poly(acrylic acid) and poly(allylamine hydrochloride) can be employed as nanoreactors for preparing silver nanoparticle composites [Langmuir, 18, 3370 (2002)]. The work was carried out in collaboration with MIT chemical engineering professor Robert E. Cohen. The team also demonstrated that the size of the nanoparticles and the overall metal concentration within the films can be systematically controlled by the polyelectrolyte solution pHs and other processing conditions. "One implication of the control over the silver content in the multilayers is the ability to systematically change the optical properties of these nanocomposite films," the authors suggested.
The 2000 Charles M. A. Stine Award in Materials Engineering and Sciences (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) presented to Robert E. Cohen, Ph.D.
(November 14, 2000)
"For pioneering research contributions to polymer science and engineering, leadership in groundbreaking educational initiatives, and development of new products and processes."
DuPont Gets A Little Guidance From Its Friends
(June 5, 2000 C&E News)R&D alliance with MIT will help DuPont find its bearings in the field of biologically enhanced materials
Sophie Wilkinson
C&EN Washington
No one likes to admit they need help finding their way. Sometimes, though, the route is so complex and the destination so desirable that a little humility is a small price to pay for a road map. In this spirit, DuPont recently established an alliance with Massachusetts Institute of Technology that will help the company lay out a path toward its long-term materials and biotechnology goals. MIT and DuPont announced the five-year, $35 million research and development alliance last year ( C&EN, Sept. 20, 1999, page 14 ).
MIT faculty and DuPont staff submitted their first round of preliminary research proposals under the alliance in late April. Working groups from MIT and DuPont got together in the first week of May to make an initial selection of 18 proposals from the 38 submitted. Projects that made it through this first cut will be described in greater detail in formal proposals and oral presentations that outline goals, research approach, specific milestones, and an indication of the projects' business relevance to DuPont. By early summer, a steering committee made up of members from both DuPont and MIT will give final approval on the selection of projects to be funded. The committee is cochaired by DuPont's chief science and technology officer, Joseph A. Miller Jr. , and Robert A. Brown , provost and professor of chemical engineering at MIT. The first research projects may get under way by September.
Those in charge of the partnership made the application process as inclusive as possible in order to attract unconventional suggestions, says Robert E. Cohen , professor of chemical engineering at MIT. Cohen serves as codirector of MIT's activities in the alliance along with Douglas A. Lauffenburger, professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering.
For this very reason, all MIT faculty were invited to submit proposals for consideration. The application process was low-key, with proposals just two or three pages in length. "We wanted to make the initial approach very low-barrier," Cohen explains. This apparently worked, because applications--many incorporating DuPont input--were submitted by faculty in such departments as the Sloan School of Management, nuclear engineering, urban planning, biology, chemistry, and materials science.
Brown says the alliance is encouraging the formation of multidisciplinary teams including participants from the science, technology, and engineering community, as well as the business, management, and policy arena. The teams will include both DuPont and MIT researchers, who will probably spend time in one another's labs.
Teams will be supported at a level up to $1.5 million per year on a multiyear basis. The alliance will also provide seed funding of about $100,000 for small groups that will focus on speculative ideas.
"There is going to be a fluidity to this program," Cohen says. "People will come in and move out of teams as the trajectory of the program and focus of the teams change. What we launch on day one will not be what elutes from the stream at the end of five years."
The projects will center on the fundamental science of biobased materials and technologies. These could include fine chemicals, monomers, biopolymers, and biomodified polymers, says Bruce E. Smart, research manager in the biochemical sciences and engineering section of DuPont Central Research & Development and the company's technology liaison to the alliance. Another area is bioelectronics, which could include anything from sensors that detect biological molecules to molecular electronics based on biological systems. DuPont may even consider materials with biomedical applications.
The MIT/DuPont R&D partnership is emblematic of the company's increased emphasis on life sciences in the past several years. DuPont has "traditionally been very strong in chemicals and polymer and inorganic materials," according to Smart. "But we feel the future of DuPont is at the interface of chemistry, materials science, and biology. The resulting biobased materials and technologies will represent the new growth opportunities for the company."
James M. Meyer , vice president of DuPont Central Research & Development and a member of the alliance's steering committee, goes so far as to predict that "the potential in applying biology to materials businesses may be greater than for two of the main applications of the science--human health care and agriculture."
Trying to figure out how to wed DuPont's traditional strengths with biology and biotechnology in order to take advantage of this emerging market is "a scientific and technical challenge," Smart admits. For guidance in its approach, DuPont elected to turn to MIT, an institution with an interdisciplinary bent and broad-based strengths in many fields.
However, even a university that is used to crossing academic divides can't take anything for granted--including language. "We're trying to meld biology and chemistry and materials science, but those areas each have their own vocabulary," Smart says. "Oftentimes, chemists do not really understand molecular biologists, and vice versa. They have to learn each others' discipline, at least to the extent that they can communicate." So beginning this fall, faculty at MIT will train a small group of graduate students backed by DuPont funding to be comfortable in these disparate worlds.
Not incidentally, DuPont has its eye on these trainees. "As happens with any new area, it's very hard to find people who are academically trained in both biology and materials science," Meyer says. "So our hope is that this alliance will allow us to develop a series of graduates with that training who could be researchers in DuPont in the future." In addition, MIT faculty will visit DuPont to present tutorials to bring business and research staff up to speed.
"DuPont people are well schooled in traditional technological disciplines--chemistry, chemical engineering, and the use of physics and mathematics," Meyer says. "And even our people who are not trained scientists have been with the businesses long enough to understand the impact of science and engineering on them. But with the exception of a few hundred people--out of 97,000--who are intimately familiar with biology and its potential impact, the rest of the people in the company don't know about it. We need to get a level of education with those folks so they are not constrained by conventional thinking and can start to see how biology could help make their business stronger."
The educational process has begun with Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Charles O. (Chad) Holliday Jr. and other senior business executives in increments of two or three hours at a stretch. "We take them through live examples of research projects that we are pursuing and teach them some of the science as we go along," Meyer says.
For other staffers, MIT will lay out a course plan that may include a week or two of classroom and lab training, Meyer says. The program will be tested on 40 employees and, based on their feedback, the course may be made available to employees on the company's intranet.
It's too soon for MIT and DuPont to know what their joint research projects will cover, though Brown does say they will entail "classical academic research." In many cases, the investigators will be free to publish their results, but some delays may be necessary to file for patents, Smart said. DuPont's funds give the company the rights to an exclusive license tied to any patents of interest that result from the research, though the university will retain a nonexclusive license to the patents for internal research purposes.
Other aspects of the project are clearer at this time. For instance, one avenue of research that DuPont and faculty in MIT's Sloan School will take up concerns how the company positions itself in the market. "With our materials businesses, we are on the front end of a long value chain," Meyer explains. "Could the science that will be developed through the alliance allow us to participate further down the value chain, closer to the finished product?"
DuPont and the Sloan School will also explore perceptions of value in business, Brown says. "The pharmaceutical industry can put a value on their pipeline for drugs that are under development and going through clinical trials," he says. "But there is no equivalent asset in the chemical world. You don't see a company like Dow or DuPont getting credit on Wall Street or with investors or shareholders for molecules they have under development." This means that a pharmaceutical company has more financial resources to call on to fund research than a chemical company has, Brown says. MIT will study how such evaluations can be made for businesses in emerging technologies.
One possible way for DuPont to transmute ideas into value--both on Wall Street and on the bottom line--is to market its knowledge base. Meyer draws a comparison with companies that analyze gene sequences and function. These businesses "don't sell a product," he says. "They sell knowledge: 'This is what the sequence is and what we believe the function of the gene is.' They sell that to people who then use it to make pharmaceuticals."
Meyer says MIT could help DuPont develop a similar capacity, potentially focused on modifying microorganisms' metabolic pathways. He sketches out a future in which company scientists learn how to tweak existing metabolic pathways so an organism will churn out a desired product such as a polypeptide or a polysaccharide at a rapid rate.
"We could become adept at very quickly getting to commercially viable routes to new materials," he says. "We could sell or license that knowledge without actually making that material."
Would DuPont be putting its future at risk by surrendering that know-how? Meyer doesn't think so. He anticipates that the market for materials derived from biological systems will be so large that "it won't be possible for any one company to do everything."
Clearly, both DuPont and MIT are expecting big things from their investment. For DuPont, the MIT partnership is unique. Its prior academic alliances have typically provided funding to individual investigators, rather than an institution.
The partnership with DuPont represents MIT's eighth alliance with a commercial partner, Brown says. The other alliances include one with Nanovation Technologies to carry out microphotonics research. In terms of funding, Brown says, the partnerships range in size from about $15 million to $90 million over five or six years.
