Microreactors for the Chemical Masses

Thomas J. Schwalbe, chief executive officer of microreactor systems maker Cellular Process Chemistry (CPC), isn't alone in believing microreactors have considerable commercial potential.

Earlier this year, Sigma-Aldrich began to evaluate CPC's microreactor system at its R&D facility in Buchs, Switzerland. Other chemical companies, such as Degussa, are considering commercial use of the technology, and many of the major drugmakers are eyeing it, too.

Because his five-year-old company is privately held, Schwalbe won't reveal sales data. But he volunteers that his estimate of the size of the microreactor market is "in the mid- to low-double-digit millions of dollars." And he reckons that the market for these Lilliputian devices could grow to $100 million in the next two years. Though they are very small, microreactors would seem to have large potential because they can be quickly scaled up from gram to multiton output.

Unlike batch-reaction vessels, a modular microreactor system, which costs between $70,000 and $200,000, does the job continuously. Instead of using large blades to mix batch contents, microreactors accomplish mixing by simple diffusion, one molecule at a time. Instead of mammoth energy-consuming heat exchangers, microreactors use tiny low-power heat-exchange plates.

CPC was "started by chemists to design flexible systems to rapidly make gram to kilogram quantities and then allow fast scale-up," Schwalbe says. The 42-year-old Schwalbe, an organic chemist with a Ph.D. from Frankfurt University, started the firm in 1999 with two other partners. All three were associated with the German research and consulting firm Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz.

The trio determined that, if they could provide the equipment, a market existed for microreactors to serve contract manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Schwalbe and his partners reasoned that microreactors could allow contract manufacturers to rapidly produce small quantities of drugs for Phase I and II clinical trials. Then they could make larger quantities for Phase III trials and beyond by simply hooking up additional cells to run in parallel, without the muss and fuss required in traditional scale-up of test-tube chemistry. Rapid chemistry optimization and reaction engineering can save up to two years in the development of a new drug, Schwalbe contends.

Schwalbe and his partners took the concept of a living cell as their model: The Cytos trade name comes from the Greek word for cell.

Experimental microreactor systems have been around as far back as the 1970s, Schwalbe explains, when researchers began to design specialized units for specific uses. But Schwalbe and his partners started CPC to design a flexible microreactor that could be used for multiple fluid reactions.

From three people in Mainz, Germany, where CPC still manufactures its microreactors, employment has grown to 22 people. The firm has offices in Tokyo and Cambridge, Mass., and plans to open an office in the U.K. To spearhead the firm's effort to sell to and service U.S. customers, Schwalbe has moved to Massachusetts.

Getting this far hasn't been easy. CPC started up just as the dot-com bubble burst, so investment capital was not easy to come by. The firm's first group of venture capitalists got cold feet, and Schwalbe and his partners had to scramble for new backers.

Venture capitalists are not known for their patience and typically seek a three- to five-year payback on their investment. The German venture-capital funds that back CPC have given it some breathing space for now. "It is difficult for start-up technical companies to survive," Schwalbe laments. But CPC is "near profitability" this year, he says. As a result, the firm is much more attractive to potential new investors.

CPC is thinking small to get big results. And as interest from pharmaceutical and specialty ingredient makers grows, Schwalbe expects the company to be in the vanguard by offering small- to large-scale continuous-processing systems with none of the unpredictability of batch scale-up.