The Hindu Business Line : Nobel laureate sees big scope for mid-sized cos in intermediary work

PROFESSOR Robert H. Grubbs, the winner of the 2005 Nobel prize in Chemistry, says entrepreneurship and technology licensing is a tough job. Having tried it himself at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Prof Grubbs said that with big corporates lowering their spend on research and development (R&D) and looking for outsourced capabilities, the business potential for mid-sized companies doing intermediary work in drug development is huge.

Caltech has promoted Materia, a start-up, which is funded by Venture Capital and run by an entrepreneur.

After a couple of years, it is now doing well with sound projects, said Prof Grubbs, who is the co-founder and continues to be the scientific advisers.

Materia is involved in a big initiative with Cargill, Caltech and the Department of Energy (DoE) in developing alternative petroleum products from renewable sources. Materia and Cargill will invest $1.9 million over two years and the DoE has promised matching funds, Prof Grubbs told Business Line.

The idea is to develop a platform of new industrial chemicals from soya and other oilseeds.

The platform would serve as the foundation for an oilseed bio-refinery in future.

Cargill is keen to exploit corn and soya to come up with suitable polymer based products.

There is already tremendous promise in making bio-degradable plastics from these sources. Cargill thinks there is big money, the Nobel laureate said.

A few years ago companies came to me for technology licensing. I am happy, doing fundamental work and leaving business opportunities to start-ups, said Prof Grubb, whose path-breaking development of a Catalyst, about a decade ago, has found widespread application in both research and commercial application (medicine and industry).

Prof Grubb's Catalyst helps accelerate the pace of synthesising a promising compound with medicinal properties. Two such catalysts have made good progress.

Boehringer of Germany has taken a compound showing promise in Hepatitis C to phase-2 trials, while Bristol Myers has made major progress in Osteoporosis (depletion of calcium from bones), he said.

Lamenting that grants for scientific research (specially basic) were cut in the US and private sector also more focussed on application led, the Nobel laureate said: "I am happy that in India, funding is going up and I see lots of young people involved in research all over the world." The 63-year old Prof Grubb, an Organic Chemist, shared the 2005 Nobel Prize with Mr Yves Chauvin of France and Mr Richard R. Schrock of MIT, Cambridge, USA, for the work on development of Metathesis methods in Organic Chemistry.

The discovery enables industry to produce plastics and drugs more efficiently and with less hazardous wastes. Metathesis means rearranging of groups of atoms within molecules.

By doing so scientists can develop novel catalysts and methods that open up opportunities in chemical synthesis.

Prof Grubb delivered a keynote address at the two-day joint international conference on Advances in Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology (AOCCB 2006), organised by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) and hosted by the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), here on his work.