What’s everyone think about this? Very interesting concept and some big promises. If its not all BS marketing shit, this could be a game changer. Says it takes crude to isolate in a continuous, closed loop system, using custom imprinted polymer beads. This would eliminate almost all post-processing steps between crude oil and isolate.
Also brags that it is much more cost efficient, but I couldn’t imagine those MIP polymer beads that are used for each run being too cheap though.
Definitely sounds pretty cool. But with anything that sounds pretty cool I am worried it doesn’t live up to their claims. I’m a little confused by something they claim: You pass material dissolved in ethanol through the beads, the beads hold onto desired compounds, and then those same desired compounds are easily washed off with another pass of ethanol. I’m sure its just a bad explanation but I don’t see why another pass of ethanol would suddenly kick off the compounds in question.
This isn’t really that novel, it looks to be pretty straightforward affinity chromatography with a custom resin designed to target cannabinoid molecules. Obviously the research that went into designing the resin itself is pretty impressive, the technology itself though is pretty common in many other purification industries, specifically pharma, biologics and other small molecule purification.
I’d have to do some research but if any of the cannabinoid molecules are immunogenic, building a resin for this purpose would actually be pretty straightforward.
Yeah that was my thought too, that it basically looked like a bunch of chroma columns…
But then on their website they talk about how chromatography is the biggest bottleneck ever and this is way better and yadda yadda
This wave is definitely the future. It’s considered desolvation. Several other companies out there offer similar filtration skids utilizing membrane technology. These guys were the first I heard of last year.
Seems to be a couple problems with these techs, such as massive solvent storage is required, and you’ll still need some sort of solvent revovery system as most of these machines leave a final “crude oil” which is about 1 part EToH and 1 part oil. So you’ll still have to remove remaining ethanol as well as refining down your cannabinoids. I suppose the goal of these companies is to dramatically reduce pre and post processing which actually does seem to be a good fit. Exciting to see where it will go.
Yep, I wondered that too. The beads pull it out of the ethanol solution when it passes through, and then when you pass more ethanol over the beads, they release the target compound? Weird
This is most likely the actual explanation. In most kinds of affinity chromatography usually salinity or pH are two of the major components to promote the elution of a bound compound. I don’t have a ton of experience with MIP though so I can only guess.
Holy crap, pharma just got a huge boner over their videos. Claims to use crude mixed into a water/ethanol solution. Pass that through polymer beads which bind to only one cannabinoid (your choice on which one), waste passes right over. Then wash the beads with a clean ethanol/water solution and the cannabinoid will dissolve back into it. Meaning the beads will be completely clean and reusable. Sounds pretty great for isolations!
Yes, that is correct. This is just a different type of chromatography. In this case it is called affinity chromatography and the mechanism is just as you would think of based on the name. It binds specific molecules by using a specific type of stationary phase. In many cases people will design their resin to target their compound of interest, which is exactly what they seemed to do here just using polymer instead of an anti-body or metal based resin.
With all chromatography there is going to be solvent recovery, etc… but the beauty of this is you can target very specific cannabinoids and the sky is the limit with the scaleability. Once you determine the saturation amount (if I have X grams of resin then I can bind Y grams of cannabinoids), you just add more resin and you bind more cannabinoids. The only downside is you have more solvent as you scale up so the solvent recovery and the initial amount of solvent required also scales up.
Running tincture through these columns of beads. Fully scalable to any extent. Who can get me these beads today? Lol sorry guys but short path and wiped film just died. Back to making crude!
I think @Kingofthekush420 told me about these guys a few months ago and i failed to investigate. I think they aren’t ready to sell models yet, still doing r&d. Theoretically can work, they just need to demonstrate selectivity, efficiency, lifespan.
