Project granted: Lab to Field - NRW Patent Validation grant to support Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar’s and Dr. Carolin Richter’s planned biotech start-up greEnCAP

Finally, we received confirmation that our application for a NRW Patent Validation Grant for the patent "chitoCAP" was successful. We will use the budget to allow Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and Dr. Carolin Richter to further validate their technology to produce chitosan-stabilized microemulsions of hydrophobic bio-actives such as plant essential oils to be used as environment-friendly and consumer-safe agro-biologics for sustainable agriculture. This will directly support their ongoing efforts to found their biotech start-up greEnCAP, which had previously been supported financially by a Start-up Transfer.NRW grant. This first grant had allowed them to establish that their encapsulation technology will work with different essential oils and with different chitosans, and to scale-up the production to the extent that sufficient material can be obtained for field trials to validate the promising results mostly obtained in the lab, in climate-controlled growth chambers, and in green houses so far. The results enabled us to submit a patent application which is currently under review. The new grant will now allow us to perform more comprehensive field trials on selected crops and their economically most relevant diseases, to substantiate the claims of the patent. We are confident that with this support, we will be able to start greEnCAP and to convince future customers, particularly from agro-industry, to collaborate on the further development of products that can be registered e.g. for the European and US American agricultural markets.