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Spin-off company reActo Ltd. Pte

New, super-efficient electrodes for removal of persistent pollutants from water have been developed in collaboration with the group of Olivier Lefevbre from Civil and Environmental Engineering. Based on our IP, we spun-off a company reActo Ltd. Pte., suported by GRIP startup incubator.

The company first won the Shell Startup Engine award. It later won the Extreme Tech Challenge and has been selected as Global finalist at the XTC TechCrunch in San Francisco, the epicentre of the venture-capital love, pitching in front of such luminaries as Bill Gates.

Graphene based membranes for osmotic energy conversion

Harvesting osmotic energy from mixing of the fresh and sea water is attractive source of non-intermittent energy, but it is limited by the lack of efficient, scalable ion-exchange membranes. With the support of National Research Foundation (Competitive Research Program), we have developed new graphene-based laminar membranes for such application (reverse electrodialysis, RED).

Fast-prototyping more than 700 different graphene chemistries, membrane compositions, additives and geometries, we have developed a unique membrane “Mark-2” that shows 30%-100% increase in energy conversion compared to the best commercial membranes (and many times over increase compared to regular graphene oxide). It is stable, scalable and reproducible.

Would this performance hold when we move from the laboratory to the industrial environment? To answer this question, we are in process of industrial benchmarking of the scaled-up membranes with an established commercial partner in the field of RED membrane applications.

Real-time detection of viral contaminants in Cell Therapy workflow

The Cell Therapy could provide previously unattainable medical benefits – such as immunotherapy of cancer, or regenerating diseased tissue – by taking patient cells, altering them, and then reinserting them back into the patient. The major bottleneck for its wider adoption is the efficient implementation automatisation of the workflow and quality controls of critical attributes, and we joined an interdisciplinary team or researchers from Singapore and USA (CAMP) tackling Cell Therapy workflow.

Detection of viral contaminants in cell cultures is particularly difficult and time-consuming. Our focus within CAMP, in collaboration with the Patrick Doyle from MIT, is the development of a new methods for fast, sensitive, in-line fingerprinting of viruses – with aim of reducing the detection time from several weeks to few hours.