Nano 101 Workshop

This tutorial track provides a broad overview of the science of nanotechnology and some of its applications. It covers the use of nanotech for advanced materials, tools, clinical applications, electronics and energy. In each case the tutorial will describe how nanomaterials add value, which applications are being targeted, what challenges the technology is facing and briefly surveys the key companies addressing that sector.

Nano EH&S

This tutorial will discuss the implications and applications of nanomaterials for environmental health & safety (EH&S). The morning portion of this tutorial will give an overview of the current landscape for nanotech EH&S, discuss how these issues will impact the industry and present a model for risk management that companies engaging in nanotechnology can consider adopting. The afternoon sessions will cover in depth how three key regulations and their associated agencies are dealing with this new technology and what this means for nanotech businesses. These regulations are – the Toxic Substances Control Act (ToSCA) which governs the use of most chemicals and materials; the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act (FDCA) which governs pesticides, comestibles, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and cosmetics; and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) which covers worker safety.

Nano IP

Intellectual property is the life-blood of any high-tech business. This is particularly the case in an emerging technology like nanotech. This tutorial will discuss what the current patent landscape looks like for various nanomaterials and where potential conflicts lie; walk through the process of applying for a nanotech patent and the challenges these applications face in comparison with other, older technologies; suggest strategies for how to create a defensible thicket of IP around a product; discuss how companies can avoid IP conflict by creating pools; and describe what steps a company can take if it feels its patents are being infringed.

Plenary Keynote

Dr. Ray Johnson, CTO, Lockheed Martin Corporation

Advanced Materials: Scaling the Business to a Size that Matters

Nanotechnology enabled advanced materials have tremendous potential to revolutionize the automotive, aerospace, displays and memory, construction and consumer goods industries. Carbon nanotubes, commonly used in composites, have a hundred times the tensile strength of steel, are a sixth of its weight, can act as metals or semiconductors based on their composition and retain their properties even when flexed, flattened or stretched. To realize the potential of these materials however, the businesses producing them must scale to meet the output, efficiency and reliability needs of the market.

This panel will discuss the challenges that present themselves when trying to take a material from lab-scale production to industrial-scale production: What intermediary steps are involved? How does a company choose a product-focus for the materials?
How do investors respond to this risk? How is market demand created for a material that is still in the lab?

Ed Moran, Director, Deloitte & Touche
Joe Cross, President & CEO, Nanophase Technologies
Scott Rickert, President, Nanofilm
David Reisner, President & CEO, Inframat Corp.
Jeet Bhatia, Harper International

Diagnostics: A Prognosis for Change in the Clinical Value Chain

Nano-enabled diagnostic devices make use of highly sensitive and accurate nanoparticle assays to create tests that, from a small sample, can quickly and accurately identify multiple diseases and conditions before they exhibit symptoms. Many of these devices are also simple enough to use that a lay-consumer can perform and interpret the tests themselves without sending samples to a lab. Given that today’s clinical value chain concentrates value in the treatment of diseases and conditions after onset or relatively late in their life-cycle, this technology will be revolutionary.

The panel will discuss how this impact: How will early detection transform the pharmaceutical industry? What is the impact of giving healthcare consumers the means to self-diagnose? How will a device that can test for multiple conditions in hours transform the economics of today’s diagnostic labs? How does the FDA deal with these devices as opposed to traditional diagnostic methods?

John L. Cleary, II, Partner, Corporate Practice, Venture Capital/Emerging Growth Company, Group National Chair, Sonnenschein
Bill Moffitt, President & CEO, Nanosphere
Amit Kumar, President & CEO, Combimatrix
David Macdonald , Vice President Business Development
David Browning, Oxonica

Tools: Seeing New Models and Markets for Growth

In the same manner that the microscope revolutionized our understanding of science, the ability to see at the nanoscale and below is a powerful force for innovation. In areas like microchip fabrication where nanoscale defects can result in large financial losses or in materials development where research is focused on the behaviors of polymers at atomic or molecular levels, these tools are invaluable. In many cases, even the inspection of common place substances can result in new information about their structure and how to produce coatings, composites or new processes for manufacture that will alter them. Tools thus drive the area of designer materials.

The nanotech tools industry has given rise to some of the most successful public nanotech companies. This panel will discuss the economics of being in the tools business: What is the size of the market? How saturated is it? Where are the highest margins extracted in the sale of a tool? What new markets exist and what are the challenges they present? What are the next innovations in tool design and what opportunities will they create?

JoAnne Feeney, FTN Midwest Research
Bob Gregg, Executive Vice President, FEI Company
Jeannine Sargent, Executive Vice President Metrology & Instrumentation and Marketing & Business Development, Veeco
Cedric Loiret-Bernal, CEO, NanoInk
Jim von Ehr, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Zyvex

From Nanomaterial Inventions to Products and Businesses
– A Global Perspective - Session supported by the Consulate General of Canada in New York

Nanotechnology is primarily the search for the means to utilize size-dependant novel properties of materials to commercial advantage, and for human benefit.  This panel session will explore the partnering and financing aspects of this enterprise and illustrate with global successes across borders. 

Raymor is a company that offers a wide range of metal and oxide nanopowders as well as carbon nanofibers and has extensive partnerships with customers in adapting their offerings to market needs.  Integran found an opportunity in replacing environmentally unacceptable chromium plating with nano-cobalt hard coatings and has adopted the plating industry business model of offering customer solutions that win consumable supply contracts.  We will have perspectives from the venture capital investment sector on their role in bringing business discipline to the commercialization process.  And finally, BASF will illustrate the sustainable advantage provided in scale-up and marketing that accompanies investment by a major global corporation that sees a connection with their technology and products.

Moderator: Dr. Faruq Marikar, Managing Partner, Nanobiz, LLC

Industry Panelist (Stéphane Robert, CEO, Raymor, Montreal)
Commercializing Materials Technology through partnership

Industry Panelist (Bob Samuel, Product Manager, Integran, Toronto/Ottawa)
Making a business of process technology for Nanomaterials Coatings

Investment Panelist (Michael L. Collett, Managing Director,Masters Capital Nanotechnology, LLC) 
VC financing of Nanotechnology – Opportunities and Limits

Corporate Ventures Panelist (Dr. Marcos Gomez, BASF Venture Capital)
Corporate investing in Nano and partnering to grow new businesses

Luncheon Keynote and Exhibits

Dr. Uma Chowdhry, CSTO, DuPont

Back to Top

Track 1:
Solar Energy: Investing in a Bright, Clean Future
Energy is the largest business in the world. The growing thirst for fossil-fuel based energy by developing economies in Asia, compounded by political strife in energy-rich areas of the world, has created an unprecedented demand and a volatile supply. Solar energy has long been recognized as a potential solution - 175,000 terawatts of solar energy hit the earth every day, three-thousand times the amount we would need to power the entire world. Nanotechnology is at the forefront of solar cell development from the mechanism from capturing light to the means to convert it into electricity and conduct the power to the devices that need it.

This panel will discuss the issues surround the commercialization of solar cells: What conditions for the price of fossil-fuel energy need to be met for solar energy to be a cost-competitive alternative? When will we reach that threshold? What are the models for extracting value from providing solar cell technology? What are the infrastructure costs of deploying this new technology?

Peter Stewart, Attorney, Curtis Mallet-Prevost Colt & Mosle LLP
Nabil Lawandy, Founder President & CEO, Spectra Systems & Solaris Nanosciences
Michael Holman, Senior Analyst, Lux Research

Water Purification: Quenching the Thirst for Clean Water
Over 40% of the world – 2 billion people – lack access to clean drinking water and this is a source of conflict in dozens of countries around the world. As noted by the Financial Times of London, "Water, like energy in the late 1970s, will probably become the most critical natural resource issue facing most parts of the world by the start of the next century."

Keith Blakely, CEO, Nanodynammics

Automotive: Driving Down Emissions
Global warming is a high-profile agenda item for the new Democratic congress and automobiles have long been recognized as a major source of greenhouse gasses. While carmakers are reacting to this problem by producing hybrid vehicles, these are still expensive and require technology and infrastructure that will take time to develop. Nanotechnology provides solutions to improve the efficiency of fuel combustion, lower the weight of vehicles without sacrificing safety and produce cleaner exhaust without requiring significantly new manufacturing processes or infrastructure.

This panel will discuss the factors that will drive the adoption and commercialization of these technologies: Do automakers have sufficient incentive to invest in driving down emissions? Will this technology ultimately be driven by regulation? Is this technology more likely to emerge abroad before it does in the U.S.? What are the challenges to scaling this technology so it can be deployed on a wide scale?

John Roy, Sr. Research Analyst/Nanotechnology & Technology Strategist, WR Hambrecht + Co.
Alan Gotcher, President & CEO, Altair Nanotechnologies
Barry Park, COO, Oxonica
Pankaj Dhingra, President & CEO, Nanostellar

Track 2:
Memory: Approaching a Universal Solution
As we continue to digitize our data-rich media and our communications, the access speed of memory is becoming as much of an issue as its capacity. Nanotechnology is enabling high-density memory solutions that combine the best features of non-volatile memory solutions and SRAM into a universal solution. The panel will discuss the barriers that face the introduction of these new solutions: Can chips be produced in sufficient quantity to prevent shortfalls? Are production yields high-enough? How reliable are the chips and how long do they last? How expensive is it to re-tool a fabrication facility to produce these new chips?

David Grubman, Shareholder, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney
Greg Schmergel, Co-Founder President & CEO, Nantero
Peter Garcia, CFO, Nanosys, Inc.
Gordon Knight, CEO, Nanochip

Displays: Bringing the Next Generation of Mobile and Large Format Displays to Market
The HDTV market exceeds $25 BN and is growing as more broadcasters go digital and global cell phone sales are projected to surpass 1 billion annually by 2009. Current approaches to high-definition display technology such as Plasma screens and LCDs have issues with quality (brightness, the ability to show true black, edge blurring etc.), energy consumption and most importantly, very high price-points. Nanotechnology enabled displays which are being pursued by electronics giants Samsung, Toshiba and Canon, promise low-cost, high-definition, ultra-thin displays that require significantly less energy to operate and are free of visual artifacts. We expect to see these in the consumer markets enabling the next generation of flat-panel televisions and cell phones in the next two to three years making this an area of nanotech with significant short-term impact.

This panel will discuss the disruptive potential of this new technology and its path to market: With so much at stake, will patent battles turn ugly and delay the advent of these displays? Can manufacturers alter production to make enough displays to meet the demands of this growing market? Will the price-to-performance advantage of these displays be sufficient to entice consumers to replace their existing HDTVs?

Jeffrey Evenson, Senior Analyst, Sanford Bernstein
Seth Coe-Sullivan, CTO, QD Vision
Joe Piche, CEO & Founder, Eikos
Zvi Yaniv, CEO, Applied Nanotech
Barry Weinbaum, CEO, Nanoopto

Green Architecture: Bringing Nanotech to the Built Environment
Construction costs represent one of the highest areas of capital expenditure in America. Green architecture is a movement to not only make the resulting buildings more environmentally friendly but to make them more efficient and cheaper to maintain by conserving energy and using materials that are treated to last longer. Nanotechnology promises better insulating dry-wall, the ability to convert “waste heat” into electricity, solar paneling for roofs and quick-curing, wear-resistant concrete.

This panel will discuss the challenges of introducing new technology into the established construction industry: What is the correct channel strategy for introducing the product? Will new technologies require new skills from construction workers? Will the market be restricted to new construction or can these technologies be applied to existing buildings? Are there applications other than housing for these materials?

Leon Radomsky, Senior Counsel, Foley & Lardner LLP
David Rosenberg, Founder & CEO, Hycrete
F. Thomas Krotine, CEO/President, Ecology Coatings
Lisa Farmen, President & COO, Crystal Clear Technologies
Doug Smith, President, Nanopore

Closing Keynote
Dr. Hans Stork, CTO, Texas Instruments

Back to Top

Medicine Investing Forum
Chair: Aatish Salvi

Bob Gregg, Executive VP,
FEI Company

10:30 - 11:30 am

2:00 - 3:30 pm