Nanotechnology companies team up

One excels at theory, the other at application.

The Houston nanotechnology company founded by Rice University Nobel laureate Richard Smalley and a California firm that plans to use nanotubes to build better electronics are merging, the companies will announce today.

The move will unite the world's leading producer of carbon nanotubes, Carbon Nanotechnologies, and Unidym, a company that can use them to make better television, phone and computer screens and other electronics.

Current CNI employees and production facilities will remain in Houston, though a new project CNI was considering here might end up somewhere else, said John Miller, Unidym's chief operating officer and a vice president at its parent company.

CNI has more than 100 nanotechnology patents, but the company has struggled to turn the small tubes — a billionth of a meter in diameter — into useful products, said Sean Murdock, executive director of the NanoBusiness Alliance.

Unidym, meanwhile, has greater strength in the application field, said equity analyst Andrew Braswell of Newbridge Securities.

"They're getting more vertical integration," Braswell said.

The companies told reporters about the merger Wednesday with the agreement they would not discuss the plan with anyone except industry analysts they pre-briefed. Braswell was one of those analysts.

All kinds of uses
Nanotubes have extraordinary properties that could allow them to be used in all kinds of ways, the companies said. They already are used in baseball bats to improve stiffness and in plastic fuel lines to prevent electrostatic discharge.

Nanotubes have 50 times the strength of steel but are lighter than aluminum. They can carry 1,000 times more current than copper, which is used in most electronics. As semiconductors, they have 70 times the electron mobility of silicon.

Hundreds of companies around the world are racing to use nanotubes to make higher capacity batteries, stronger bulletproof vests, solar panels, fuel cells, low-cost transistors and drug delivery vehicles for cancer treatments. Doctors might use a nanotube to deliver a cancer drug that might be toxic to normal cells directly into the malignant cell, CNI chief Bob Gower said.

"We're at the brink of the really high-value applications," said Gower, who likened the world-changing potential of nanotubes to the Internet. "This is truly disruptive technology."

Nobel Prize
Smalley, who died of cancer in 2005, won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for his co-discovery of buckminsterfullerenes, dubbed buckyballs, the spherical ancestor of the nanotube.

Toward the end of his life, Smalley focused on developing medical applications in nanotechnology. Now the company he founded will join Unidym and put its primary focus on electronics.

Unidym's first product, expected to launch next year, is a transparent electrode intended to replace indium tin oxide electrodes in products such as touch screens and solar cells, Miller said. Existing touch screens fail after being repeatedly poked in the same place by a finger or stylus — a problem nanotube-based screens won't have, said Miller, who estimated the potential market for the products at $1 billion.

But Unidym won't completely leave medical applications behind, he said. The company hopes to make big money on electronics. As it develops more nanotechnology applications, the company would likely license its intellectual property to pharmaceutical companies that would then develop specific medical uses, he said.

Under the terms of the merger, which is expected to close in April, outstanding shares of CNI will be converted to preferred stock in Unidym, a subsidiary of Pasadena, Calif.-based, publicly traded Arrowhead Research Corp.

Arrowhead will exchange $5.4 million of its common stock for preferred stock in CNI, Arrowhead said.

source:www.chron.com