Introducing Luna Innovations

As of July 1st, 2006, Luna Innovations is the newest component of the Edwards Real Nanotech Index (ERNI). The company only recently went public; on June 2, the company offered 3.5 million shares at $6.00 each, which is about where it is currently trading.

Luna has four divisions: Contract Research, Luna Advanced Systems, and Luna Technologies, and Luna NanoWorks.

Contract Research currently supplies most of the company’s income. Their specialties are things like coatings that repel water, corrosion, heat, electromagnetic interference and nasty micro-organisms; polymer photovoltaic devices; fiber optics; and medical diagnostic and monitoring systems.

Luna Advanced Systems is working on medical and industrials sensing devices. The company recently released an ultrasound device to detect emboli in the blood stream. Emboli can be anything with the potential to block flow, but particularly bubbles and clots. Luna’s Emboli Detector and Quantifier system can detect microemboli at rates as high as 1000 per second. The system uses tracking systems originally developed for missile defense. The instrument is targeted toward cardiothoracic surgeons, anesthesiologists and perfusionists. Luna Advanced Systems also markets techy items to the federal government.

Luna Technologies makes fiber optic test and measurement systems—for instance the Optical Vector Analyzer and the Optical Backscatter Reflectometer (you wanted to know, didn’t you?). Basically this is test equipment for optical telecommunications networks.

Luna nanoWorks develops and manufactures proprietary fullerene products. It is located in Danville, VA, once a center of the tobacco industry. The city fathers, in order to fight rising unemployment that has been twice the state’s average, have been promoting the areas’ charms to the nanotech industry, with a lot of help from the state government. Luna has taken over a former tobacco warehouse on the banks of the Dan River. The company gutted the inside, leaving only beams and the foot-thick brick walls. In this unlikely space, they are building what they hope to be a nanotech powerhouse, capable of producing ton quantities of nanomaterials. An old railroad spur backs up to the warehouse/factory, awaiting the day when this promise is fulfilled. A cobblestone street in front of the building completes the picture of a nineteenth century setting for this high tech upstart.

The president of Luna NanoWorks, Stephen Wilson, is a former chemistry professor from New York State University, and is also the scientific founder of another nanotech firm, C-Sixty. Wilson was one of the first to see the possibilities inherent in buckyballs—cornering on behalf of C-Sixty much of the then available intellectual property surrounding medical applications of that curious molecule.

In addition to commercial production carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, the company hopes to commercialize what it calls trimetaspheres. These are a larger version of the buckyball, with 80 carbons caging up to three metal or rare earth atoms, such as scandium, lanthanum or yttrium, which are covalently to nitrogen. The nitrogen complex spins freely within the larger cage of carbons. Trimetaspheres were invented by accident when an air leak contaminated a reactor being used to make buckyballs. Rather than merely discard the preparation and start over, Harry Dorn, a professor at Virginia Tech University decided to characterize the anomalous chemical species that were thus formed. Science was once again served by the unplanned experiment and a curious mind.

According to Wilson, trimetaspheres have potential uses as contrast agents for medical magnetic resonance imagining, as light emitting diodes, and potentially for molecular electronics and computing.