The NRRI Chemical Extractives Team: (back row, from left) Wolfgang Hechtl, Pavel Krasutsky, Oleksiy Kacharov, Jonathan Lee, (front row, from left) Oksana Kolomitsyna, Sergiy Yemets, and Liliya Kacharova.
The NRRI Chemical Extractives Team: (back row, from left) Wolfgang Hechtl, Pavel Krasutsky, Oleksiy Kacharov, Jonathan Lee, (front row, from left) Oksana Kolomitsyna, Sergiy Yemets, and Liliya Kacharova.
New products drive the economy and chemicals often drive new products. But there can be an unhealthy side to synthetic chemicals, so scientists are increasingly turning to chemicals derived from nature.
NRRI’s Chemical Extractives Laboratory holds many patents for separating valuable chemicals from plants and natural industry by-products. Now the lab is making it easy for bio-product businesses—agri-chemical, pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical, and nutraceutical—to have access to their lab’s large library of chemicals. This will save the industries time and money in the costly development of new products.
“There are hundreds and thousands of chemicals that could be interesting for biological research, screened against pathogenic diseases, applied to anti-viral, anti-bacterial products…” said program director Pavel Krasutsky. “Chemists in those industries can search our library to fill a need they may have.”
This new commercial venture is called CASEO: Chemistry, Analysis, Synthesis, Extraction and Optimization, and it holds the promise of providing thousands of high-value chemicals. To effectively market CASEO’s potential, NRRI is seeking to partner with another provider of custom chemistry services, chemical building blocks and screening libraries. This partnership could then offer one of the largest and most diverse proprietary screening collections of small organic compounds in the world.
“A chemist can look at the chemical structures, analyze whether or not it will work for them and then request a supply—from 10 milligrams to 100 grams,” Krasutsky explained. “We have the capacity to produce up to 100 kilograms of chemicals for new drugs, hair care and cosmetic products, whatever need their industry has.”
NRRI’s Chemical Extractives Lab is especially well known for extracting betulin, betulinic acid, and its derivatives—long used in cosmetics—from birch bark. Betulinic acid was first identified as having properties that fight carcinogenic melanoma. Especially remarkable are the biological and medical benefits of birch bark triterpenoids—a new class of anti-cancer and anti-HIV bioactives that attack the disease in a new way.
The patent portfolio from the Chemical Extractives Lab is the largest in the University of Minnesota system. To learn more about the services offered by the CASEO Service Center at NRRI visit www.nrri.umn.edu and click on the Chemical Extractives link.
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