Case Studies

Renewable Feedstocks – Before renewables became a buzzword, Cargill understood how chemicals based upon such feedstocks might one day meet significant market needs. In 2003, the company engaged Materia to explore how metathesis might be applied for the synthesis of high value fine chemical products from its natural oils. Under a multi-year sponsored program, Materia developed commercially viable processes by evaluating and manipulating feedstocks, catalyst systems, and other key reaction variables. As reaction efficiencies improved and the breadth of potential opportunities increased, the program’s work plan grew, with significant expansions taking place first in 2005 and again in 2007. In 2008, the venture was spun off as Elevance Renewable Sciences with independent financing from the Texas Pacific Group.

Elevance is broadly commercializing Materia’s metathesis technology as applied to natural oils and projects $1B in revenues by 2016. In mid 2010, the company took a large step towards this goal by initiating a joint venture with Wilmar International, Asia’s leading agribusiness group. The new venture will apply metathesis technology for the production of high performance chemicals in a world scale biorefinery (400-800 million pounds) that is expected to come online in 2011. For more information, visit Elevance.

Specialty Material Synthesis – Hydrogenated nitrile butyl rubber (HNBR) is a specialty material used in the automotive and petroleum industries. In the early 2000s, Lanxess (then part of Bayer Material Science AG) identified a market need for a more easily processed HNBR and hypothesized that metathesis might provide a solution. Their research substantiated this hypothesis and ultimately resulted in the development of the low viscosity HNBR product Therban® AT, which delivers increased throughput and improved performance to HNBR consumers and in 2006 received the DKG Product Award for rubber innovation.  Lanxess has continued to extend its metathesis work and in 2010 announced a new Therban® AT grade that flows 1,000-10,000 times more easily than existing HNBR grades. Materia sells its metathesis catalysts to Lanxess under a commercial license. For more information, visit Therban.

Novel Drug Candidates – The pharmaceutical industry is constantly searching for new ways to modulate disease processes and one “holy grail” approach has been the manipulation of intracellular protein-protein interactions. In the mid 1990’s, academic researchers discovered a new class of compounds that they called stapled peptides that showed promise in solving this problem. The scientists generated validating data but synthesizing intra-cellularly stable and high efficacy compounds proved extremely difficult until Dr. Grubbs’ metathesis technology provided the manufacturing solution.

By 2007, stapled peptides’ potential had been sufficiently validated to support the creation of a new company – Aileron Therapeutics – for technology commercialization. Materia and Aileron’s founding management team structured a win-win commercial license agreement to Materia’s technology platform and Aileron was born. Since its inception, the company has continued proof-of-concept work that has in turn attracted significant big pharma interest. In 2009, the company raised $40M in a Series D funding from venture funds associated with GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Roche. For more information, visit Aileron.