WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)— A West Lafayette-based tech startup has secured its last round of funding, allowing them to prepare for their commercial launch.
Novilytic was founded 8 years ago with the goal of developing technologies that would help people become safer and healthier.
According to CEO, Paul Dreier, this funding will allow them to launch by early 2023.
“Well we’re just using nanotechnology to detect poisons and improve the quality of drug manufacturing,” said Dreier.
Additionally, the technology will be used in real time, which is crucial. Currently, the only way to control quality is to take a sample and analyze it for 4 to 8 hours while production is still occurring. If the product is bad, then they have a massive clean up to do. The new nanotechnology will cut that window down to 15 minutes, ultimately making pharmaceutical products safer to consume.
According to Novilytic Founder and CTO, Dr. Fred Regnier, there can be issues in pharmaceutical manufacturing when it comes to quality control.
“And so just [like] when you manufacture anything else, you’d like to know that it’s good and that everything you’re manufacturing hour by hour is therapeutic, said Regnier. “And so that’s what we do. We’re in the process of making instruments that will do that.”
The new technology is not overly complicated. It is easy to use and accessible for companies to purchase.
“So the customer does not have to go out and do a bunch of capital expenditures to be able to utilize this technology,” Dreier said. “It’s really a plug and play technology that may be utilized in any of about 250,000 instruments that are out in the world today.”
Dr. Regnier, a former Purdue professor, stressed that a lot of people in academia do research like this but don’t always commercialize it to share with society.
“During the course of teaching, periodically you will see things that you realize that the scientific community knows, but it’s not being used in society,” said Regnier. “And one of them was quality control of pharmaceutical substances in human medicine. It wasn’t really being done.”
Dr. Regnier also pointed out that people used to have to travel to the east or west coasts in the past to get jobs in the technology industry.
He is proud that Novilytic is part of a movement that is putting a stop to that, allowing technology that is conceived in Indiana to also be manufactured and sold here.
