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Background:

Plastics are very practical and used throughout the daily life, but new functions are always required from the market. At the same time, there is a concern about the possibility of causing environmental problems. Now, there are a wide variety of biologically derived monomers.

A yet2 client, a chemical and material company in Japan, is interested in producing polymers with new functions (e.g. hard plastic) from these biomass monomers and, therefore, particularly interested in cyclic compounds which can be a base materials for such polymers.

The company is looking for partners for joint research and development and/or commercialization with organizations that have such cyclic compound technologies.

Constraints:

Compounds should have a cyclic component not as a sidechain, but in the backbone of the monomer structure.

Compounds should have potential for mass-production at the industrial level rather than for analysis.

For the initial evaluation they would like to obtain the following information.

  1. Type of biomass (starting materials)
  2. Biological reaction (e.g. fermentation process) and type of enzyme/bacteria/fungus used.
  3. Molecule structure of the resulting cyclic compounds
  4. Stage of development
  5. Developing partners, grant etc.

 

Possible solution areas:

  • Material, Biology and Industrial biotechnology

Field of use and intended applications:

  • Materials for general purposes

Desired outcome of the solution:

  • Cyclic compounds could become hard plastics after polymerization.
  • They would like to evaluate the proposed biomass-derived monomers even if it is unclear whether it can be polymerized or not.
  • It is not necessary to be biodegradable.
  • After polymerization, cyclic structure should be expected to be arranged in the main chain of the polymer
  • Lignin and chain diol are out of scope (cyclic diol is in the scope)

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