Date: Feb 25, 2015 Author: Jeff Montgomery Source: Delaware News Journal (
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University of Delaware professor and biomedical researcher Sharon Rozovsky sees membranes as one of life's earliest requirements -- a shell that began to surround globs of primordial ooze, allowing primitive cells to get about the business of duplicating themselves, competing and evolving.
From there, things got ever more complex, both for membranes and the people who study and make them or attempt to use their features for health care, science or industry.
Whether biological or synthetic, membranes are big business, an obsession of science and medicine, a Holy Grail for industries always looking for better ways to protect, separate, purify, change. What began as a bubble of pre-historic, layered fatty acids that could let a few things pass in or out is now a complex and only partially understood universe of surfaces where physical, chemical and biochemical processes play out.
Along the way, Delaware became a landmark as discoveries by companies like the DuPont Co. and W.L. Gore Associates contributed to an explosion of useful and specialized synthetic materials.
The groundwork was laid locally with DuPont's development products like Permasep, used to produce breakthrough water desalination systems, and the earlier fluoropolymer Teflon and Gore's later innovations with the same material.
All manner of polymer membrane fabrications followed, changing scientific and industrial methods for filtering, gatekeeping or chemical reacting.
The state also became a magnet for researchers hoping to find, on or around membranes, the keys to cures for a range of diseases and genetic problems, from childhood cancers to the physical changes and health burdens of aging.
"About 30 percent of all proteins in cells are thought to be associated with membranes," Rezovsky said, adding that the vast majority of drugs target those proteins. But until recently researchers understood the workings of only a handful of those proteins.
"Right now, the unique protein database is up to 524. For people in the field, we never envisioned we would have such a wealth of information," Rezovsky said. "Every week you open Nature in Science and there's a new structure. All this information will be critical for the questions of medicine."
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Critical questions in the world of industry are being answered locally as well.
Already, Delaware-made synthetic membranes help keep oxygen out of fuel tanks in Boeing 737s and the military's F-22 Raptor, reducing fire risks. And global gas enterprise Air Liquide's Glasgow research center is midway through a major Department of Energy contract to demonstrate capture systems for carbon dioxide emitted by future power plants.
Whether water or greenhouse gas, heated sweat vapors or cold water, many synthetic membranes work in a similar way. Precise, molecule-sized pathways, bundles of hair-sized polymer tubes kick unwanted carbon dioxide out of streams of natural gas, or remove water from oil and pollutants from smokestacks and drinking water.
Non-porous membranes, in contrast, can be made for all manner of purposes, including a recently installed flexible, photovoltaic roof that uses a DuPont material for shade and rain cover, while also generating low-voltage electricity at the Staten Island Children's Museum.
"The applications are increasing," said W.L. Gore Associate's Uwe Buscher, current president of the North American Membrane Society. "We're a technology society and that's our focus, but there's a very large organization that focuses on applications, and there are global organizations."
Continuing advances have blurred the line between synthetic and biological, in the meantime, with researchers at Penn State University, for example, striving to find ways to use synthetic membrane filters to purify proteins for biotechnology, or to array synthetic membranes in a way that mimic the work of a human kidney.
At the University of Delaware and A.I. duPont Hospital for Children, Sigrid A. Langhans is among the scientists with hands in both the biological and synthetic worlds. Langhans is head of the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory at the Children's Hospital, as well as assistant professor of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University and adjunct associate professor of materials science and engineering at UD.
"Some cancer cells have specific biomarkers, and you can exploit that," Langhans said. "It's like a little flag waving: 'Here I am. I'm a cancer cell.' So you can design nano-materials that specifically recognize that kind of cell and bind to them."
Wilmington-based Compact Membrane Systems has been pushing the boundaries of synthetic membrane technologies since the mid-1990s, developing systems for separating liquids, gases or liquids and gasses.
"We went in the wrong direction for a while," said Stuart Nesmer, whose company employs 24 people at two sites, along with about a dozen engineering interns each summer. "We've gotten to a fairly nice point. There's a lot of business growth that's coming our way."
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CMS fabricates a specialty DuPont Teflon material so that liquids give up gases or other liquids according to the size of their molecules. One use takes dangerous gases out of the oils used to insulate transformers. Another removes water from oil or lubricants. Work is under way on systems that could allow removal of harmful gases from water recycled in toilets used in the International Space Station or other spacecraft.
"That was the applications my grandchildren liked the best," Nesmer said. "They thought it was cool that we were recycling the urine [in spacecraft] at a research level."
More troubling concerns abound, particularly as biomedical and synthetic membrane advances continue and, as Rezovsky points out, basic understanding of cells and membranes lead to a merging of biology, chemistry, genetics and pharmaceuticals.
"It's difficult to predict what is going to be the outcome of all that," Rezovsky said. "Where is the biological revolution taking us. Is it going faster than we can even control. It's very scary. There are enormous ethical questions, and a majority of the public is not in a position to grasp them all."
Contact Jeff Montgomery at (302) 463-3344 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com.
