CSOL: closing the gap between ICIQ’s discoveries and industry

Foto Grup Csol

From left to right: Dr. Fernando Bravo, Dr. Mª Angeles Sarmentero, Dr. Sébastien Lethu, Dr. Thirusangumurugan Senthamarai, Dr. Ivana Lapuh, Dr. David Hermann Lamparelli, Dr. Ana Isabel Oliva, Dr. Dani Font and Dr. Anton Cunillera.

Is your company looking for disruptive technologies, but it is missing the expertise and facilities to develop it? Are you looking for a partner to outsource any custom synthesis? Do you want to implement state of the art technologies in your business model?

Catalyst Selection and Optimization Laboratory (CSOL) is ICIQ’s innovation unit, working in the knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) from Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ-CERCA) to the pharmaceutical and chemical industry.

This transition phase, which counts with great professionals with several years’ worth of experience, is divided in two main areas: the first one, working on innovation and technology valorisation of ICIQ’s projects; the second one, developing projects with industrial partners.

The CSOL know-how in valorisation allows optimizing, scaling and improving the technologies and processes discovered at the centre, such as catalysts and reagents, reactions, equipment design, and prototype construction. Companies seek to offer competitive goods and services. In technology-based products, this may be achieved by faster, cheaper, and more efficient procedures. In this way, CSOL unit valorises and develops ICIQ’s discoveries, focusing on ICIQ’s proprietary patented technologies, to provide them with stronger and broader protection. The valorisation effort increases the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the technology, which is a way to quantify how far the technology is of being marketed. Once these technologies have been sufficiently matured, they can be transferred to pharmaceutical and chemical industries, thus enabling future commercial exploitation. These valorisation activities are funded with different strategies: competitive public funding programs from European, National or Regional agencies, donations or ICIQ’s internal.

CSOL’s second main task is to conduct projects with industry. In these cases, the projects are fully funded by the company, which signs a Contract Research Project with ICIQ in order to contract directly the services of KTT to work in a specific topic of their interest. Sometimes the company signs a Contract Research Project with one of ICIQ’s Group Leaders, due to their particular area of expertise, and the project is carried out in the CSOL’s laboratory in order to take advantage of CSOL’s expertise, dedicated equipment and the centre chemical facilities to respond to specific industrial needs. Some examples of projects carried out for industry include synthesis on demand, sustainable material research and optimization projects.