Snapdragon Chemistry to develop continuous tech for US manufacturers with $1.5 DARPA grant

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Image Credit: Snapdragon Chemistry

The $1.5 million grant will allow Snapdragon to develop its continuous manufacturing platform for the US pharmaceutical industry.

US-based pharmaceutical and fine chemical manufacturing firm Snapdragon Chemistry has just been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the company announced today.

With the grant providing development funding over the next two years, Snapdragon says it will help secure the domestic supply chain and provide cost savings for pharmaceutical manufacturing with its continuous technology.

The DARPA grant will also offer additional funding for commercialisation in the next 12 months.

Snapdragon says it will direct R&D on the design of a programmable platform manufacturing system able to process commodity feedstocks into high-value functionalised building blocks.

Commenting on the grant, President and CEO of Snapdragon Chemistry, Matthew Bio, said: “We are thrilled to be selected by DARPA to further our development efforts.

“This grant will allow us to bring together expertise in automation and continuous manufacturing to create a platform technology for the manufacture of pharmaceutical intermediates and fine chemicals.

“We expect this technology will become a key component of a secure national supply chain for the chemical components critical to health and human welfare.”

“The DARPA grant will facilitate our development of next-generation continuous flow manufacturing technology for flexible, on-demand production of a diverse set of vitally important fine chemical building blocks from commodity chemicals with far less waste compared with the existing ‘dirty chemistry’ that was originally developed in the late 19th century,” added Dr. Eric Fang, Snapdragon CSO.

The US DARPA offers funding opportunities to academic, corporate, and governmental partners in the fields of physics, engineering, biology, medicine, computer science, chemistry, mathematics, material sciences, social sciences, neurotechnology and more. To learn more, visit the following link.