Warwick spinout, Stoli Catalysts, wins €1.2m to halve the cost of making medicines, vitamins and food supplements
Stoli Catalysts, a spin-out company from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick has been awarded €1.2m (£1.1m) from the European Innovation Council (EIC) SME Instrument scheme to design, build and test a small-scale pilot plant to make medicines, vitamins and food supplements at much lower cost and more sustainably using its patented continuous flow catalytic reactor technology.
Stoli Catalysts was spun out of research by Professor Evgeny Rebrov and Dr Nikolay Cherkasov of the University of Warwick’s Engineering School in 2017. Dr Cherkasov was recently awarded an Enterprise Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering to support the translation of his research to Stoli Catalysts.
The company has since developed its technology to create catalyst-coated tubes for use in continuous flow reactors. It will enable the £600bn Fine Chemicals industry to convert from batch to continuous flow, thereby dramatically cutting production costs.
Stoli Catalysts’ patented technology and reactor designs use 100-1000 times less precious metal, enables potential production cost reductions of 20-80%.
There has already been significant commercial interest with early multinational customers commissioning development projects.
With the EIC grant the company can now move from lab-scale projects to pilot continuous flow production. Stoli Catalysts has set up facilities on the University of Warwick’s Wellesbourne campus and is hiring four new chemical engineering developers and expanding its commercial team.
Lawrie Matthews, CEO of Stoli Catalysts and former Global Chemicals Business Development Manager at Johnson Matthey, commented: “This is an exciting business that could transform continuous throughput manufacturing of fine chemicals and lower costs significantly for the pharmaceutical sector. The EIC grant is a major contribution to advancing the production engineering and will help accelerate Stoli’s commercial progress from lab-scale projects to pilot production runs.
Besides cutting production costs dramatically, Stoli’s technology is much more sustainable, using less energy and generating less waste.”
Image credit: Stoli Catalysts, University of Warwick.
