Orchids, iPods and Owlstone

You have to admire their style. Advance Nanotech, a British/American venture capital group, gave a nice reception at the NanoCommerce conference in Chicago for their portfolio company Owlstone. The soiree featured scotch poured out in tumblers and three lovely young ladies who served as hostesses. As NanoCommerce, like any nano conference, had a male: female ratio of about 20:1, these beauties stood out like exotic orchids in a desert.

After being chatted up by the women, I was passed off to an even younger gentleman, who I took to be an intern, as he looked to be maybe nineteen and in fact turned out to be all of twenty-six. He introduced himself as Andrew Koehl, co-founder of Owlstone, a spinout from Cambridge University in the U.K. The other co-founder is his equally young classmate, Billy Boyle, an effusive Irishman.

What do they do? Well, using nanofabrication techniques, they have shrunk a field asymmetric ion mass spectrometry device (FAIMS) to the point that it could fit in a badge size detector that could be clipped to your shirt pocket. Why would you want such a thing? Basically, this is a chemical detection device, similar to the tabletop instruments that are employed at airport security gates, which security personnel use to monitor swabs for the presence of explosive materials, etc. Owlstone shrinks the box 1000 fold so that it could be carried easily and unobtrusively by soldiers, cops or FBI agents. The device also has medical uses for breath analysis, and could be employed for monitoring environmental quality, chemical process control or even as a smoke detector. All told, the company projects an addressable market of $4 billion or so.

FAIMS is an improvement on plain vanilla ion mobility spectrometry, which can’t easily be miniaturized, since resolution is determined by migration of the chemical in question through a drift tube. Current technology also suffers from the need for high voltages. FAIMS, on the other hand, requires ionization of the chemical with a radioactive source, which has its own liabilities, but presumably the quantity of radioactivity would be so minimal as to be harmless. Identification of individual entities involves both the mass and the shape of the chemical. Owlstone claims that the device can be used to detect any chemical compound in gas phase.

I can’t comment on the business acumen of the two young entrepreneurs. Hopefully, the connection with Advance Nanotech will be useful to them in this regard. But the gadget, if it works as advertised, seems really impressive. In the future, sensors of all kinds will likely be ubiquitous and Wi-Fi enabled, so the CDC or the FBI can respond immediately, as needed. FAIMS would appear to be able to detect a large fraction of all things worth detecting.

Aside from Billy Boyle’s presentation, the highlight of the evening was a drawing for two Apple iPods Nano. Everybody threw their business card in a bowl and Boyle drew one out. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I won an iPod. The secret of these drawings, I am convinced, is to have a business card that is slightly larger than average and made with a somewhat rough paper stock. While all the shiny, standard cards congeal in a lump at the bottom of the bowl, the larger card is easily grasped and its texture is pleasing to the fingers.

Let me state categorically that neither free gifts nor the attention of young ladies will buy space on this blog. However, I do enjoy and appreciate all attempts to subvert this ethical standard.