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Firm has big dreams for nanocrystals

Bio-Vision: Market potential is huge

A small Nova Scotia company is hoping to tap into a potentially huge market with some technology you can’t even identify under a microscope.

Bio-Vision Technology Enterprises Inc. of New Minas has produced a product it calls Nanocel, a chemically modified version of nanocrystalline cellulose, at a pilot plant in Montreal. The 150-nanometre-long, pine-needle-shaped crystals are extracted from wood pulp using a patented formula.

“That’s smaller than you will see under a typical microscope,” said Stephen Allen, Bio-Vision’s vice-president of technology.

“If you were to blow it up or magnify, it would look like a little hair.”

Bio-Vision is one of a handful of Canadian companies hunting for uses for nanocrystalline cellulose. Those could include everything from making lighter, stronger airplane parts to creating paints and varnishes that are more durable.

“They’re about six times as strong as steel,” Allen said of the crystals that, to the human eye, look like talcum powder.

The potential for nanocrystalline cellulose is huge, he said.

“All predictions right now are showing just the Canadian market alone is somewhere potentially valued at $200 million to $250.million annual within maybe the next five to 10 years,” Allen said. “I think typically people always create a shorter timeline than is quite realistic.”

At a National Research Council facility in Montreal, Bio-Vision mixed wood pulp in a bath of water and chemicals and left it overnight. That oxidizes the cellulose in the pulp.

“The oxidation process completely removes and totally degrades to practically nothing the amorphous parts of the cellulose; it just rips it to shreds,” said Allen, who is trained as a biochemist.

The result has Anne Franey, who heads Bio-Vision, seeing dollar signs.

“We made 150 kilograms of the white gold at (the National Research Council’s Biotechnology Research Institute in Montreal) last year and now we’re looking for strategic partners,” Franey said.

The federal government’s premier organization for research and development came up with the technology behind Nanocel.

“We hold an exclusive licence from the NRC to exploit the technology and the product,” Allen said. “It’s a very coveted prize.”

Bio-Vision’s now working with various academic researchers and companies to develop different market applications for Nanocel.

“Within the past six months or so we’ve had over 50 serious inquiries,” Allen said. “A number of those inquiries have led to those individuals being given access to our material and they’ve begun to work with it in specific projects.”

If they come up with lucrative ways to use Nanocel, Bio-Vision wants to supply the material.

“Our goal is to certainly be in a position within the next year to have identified one really good market application that will catapult us to the next stage of development, which is to produce a full demonstration-scale plant,” Allen said.