SiMPore's 15 nanometer thick ultrathin membrane enables precise and rapid separation of biological molecules and other nanomaterials.
CEO: Rick Richmond
Location: New York, USA
Industry: Pharma & Biotech
Venture is: Seed Level
SiMPore, Inc. has been selected to present at the upcoming TechConnect Summit in Boston, June 3-5, 2008. Mr. Thomas Gaborski, Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development for SiMPore, provided us with several update on the company and recent funding and development news.
SiMPore develops and produces ultra-thin nano-porous membrane filters and filtration products based on a new silicon membrane platform technology.
Membranes and membrane filters in use today are based on technology that dates from the mid-20th century. These filters are adequate for the microporous (one millionth of a meter) and submicroporous filtration for which they were initially developed.
With the advance of technology, biomedical research, pharmaceutical production and even industrial and consumer products have come to rely on nanoscale building blocks. Viruses, genes, proteins and nanoparticles are the new frontier. The need for filtration has expanded to include filtering and separating nanomaterials, not only for research and production, but also to protect from nanoparticle contamination in industrial processes and eliminating bio- and chemical hazards. Conventional polymer microporous membrane technology has attempted to address these needs for nanoporous filtration by tweaking microporous technology, but have not addressed many needs of the nano-world.
Mr. Gaborski tells TechConnect that SiMPore is exclusively licensing this novel silicon membrane technology from the University of Rochester, where researchers and SiMPore co-founders have received over $1.5M in federal funding in the previous 12 months. In addition, SiMPore and the University of Rochester were awarded $473,000 in February by NYSTAR for the co-development and commercialization of SiMPore's porous silicon membrane for biomolecule filtration.
SiMPore is also pursuing industrial collaboration and is engaged in co-development talks with major filtration companies. Currently, SiMPore is raising $500,000 in an angel round and expects to seek an A-round in 2009.
