Technology Wanted

Removal / extraction of proteins and/or polyphenols from dried plant materials

Looking for new technologies which are able to effectively remove / extract proteins and/or polyphenols with the aim of using material in consumables

The currently used extraction process is technically difficult to scale up for commercial supply and uses large quantities of water making it unsustainable for long term use. The desired technology for this protein extraction can be physical, chemical or biological but should fulfil the following criteria:

- High yield of the remaining material after the extraction process

- Simple and potential to be an economic process

- Preferably the original form of the plant material is maintained after the process, but this is not critical.

- The plant material must be suitable for human contact at the end of the process

- We have previously worked with enzymes for extracting proteins from the plant material, but lowering the enzyme residues to the recommended exposure limits for human contact was a major concern so there is a strong preference for solutions which are not enzyme based. However, cold temperature enzymes do remain of potential interest. While we are primarily focused on

commercial scale processes, or processes that can be economically scaled, we are interested to learn of emerging techniques for protein and/or polyphenols removal from research institutions.

Technologies of interest could come from the following industries, amongst others:

- Pharmaceutical

- Biotech

- Food and Beverage

- Chemicals

- Any industry with the need to separate out proteins for further downstream processing

We will consider technology not covered by a patent.