Greasing the wheels of big industries can give small companies a foot in the door and sufficient revenue to expand, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

AS A SMALL company, how do you take on the might of a crowded industry? One approach is to sidle into a niche with a product that greases the wheels of a widely used process. That has been the tack of Cork-based company Glantreo – they developed technology that feeds into chromatography, an analytical method used across the food, chemical, biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.

“Chromatography is a method to separate, purify and quantify chemical mixtures. It’s used in almost every lab, wherever chemicals are involved,” explains Dr John Hanrahan, Glantreo’s chief technical officer. “Within chromatography, the actual separating is done by a packed column of silica particles. We have come up with a new way of making these silica particles which increases the speed and the capacity at which chromatography can be carried out.” While a researcher at University College Cork, Hanrahan developed an approach, with funding from Enterprise Ireland, to make uniform silica particles efficiently.

“The beauty of the whole process is that it gives a mono-dispersed particle size. So if you are looking for two micron-sized particles you get two micron particles,” he says. “That was a big problem before – you were looking for two and . . . you were getting 10 and you had to then separate out the ones you didn’t want. That means you lose a lot of the yield of the particles you are looking for when you are making the particles.”

Glantreo was set up to commercialise the technology, called sub2sila, which improves on existing approaches to preparing silica for use in chromatography. “Conventionally the yield would be about 10 per cent and the time taken to make that 10 per cent would be about two months, whereas our process is over in a week and it gives 100 per cent yield,” says Hanrahan.

“The end user will be the analyst working in Pfizer or GSK . . . the big plus for them is that they will be able to do chromatography better and faster.” Glantreo has just sub-licensed the technology to a US chromatography company in a €7.4 million deal. It has been a way for the Cork company to get foothold in the industry, according to Hanrahan.

“We are never going to become a major chromatography company – there are nine or 10 major players in the world and we are not going to be able to break into that. But there are different levels at which you can get into that market. At the bottom of the food chain, for example, you can develop a bit of a technology and sub-license it on to somebody else. That is what we have done, to get our foot in the door and to get revenue into the company,” he says.

“The next step up the ladder, and what we see ourselves doing, is taking a technology, developing it and coming up with a product that we can white-label and maybe sell or distribute through some of these big companies. The heavy lift would be to become one of those big companies but that’s realistically not going to happen for some time, if ever. But yes, there’s an opportunity there for people to come up with a small part of the bigger jigsaw.”

Hanrahan also has designs on helping other academics in Ireland move their technologies to market in chromatography. “We have found there is a big gap between what industry wants and what academic people have. We are that bit in the middle, we can see both sides – the academic has a nice piece of technology but it needs a bit or work, the industry has a need but doesn’t know how to get to it or doesn’t want to spend a lot of time or money getting to it,” he says.

“A lot of these technologies are not just a piece of paper that you hand to industry, there’s a person involved and a lot of RD to be done and to transfer it, and an academic doesn’t have the time to hop on a plane to the US for three weeks several times a year.”

The company has met some resistance to its approach of not seeking external investment, but Glantreo is sticking to that path, says Hanrahan. [People] almost want you to be the big company, to get to 10 or 20 people with millions in turnover, but we said we want to grow this fairly organically – we haven’t taken outside investment, we are self funded and the revenue we have generated from this first deal will secure us for the next couple of years and help us get on.”