Harnessing biotechnology to revolutionize separation science.
The world is overdue for a breakthrough in separation technology.
Vandstrom is a multidisciplinary team of ambitious professionals who are taking on this challenge by industrializing a biological principle of separation and purification that nature has perfected over billions of years.
The world’s most efficient purification mechanism has evolved over eons: the membrane transport protein.
All living organisms use specialized transport proteins to move specific molecules and ions in and out of cells with remarkable efficiency and precision. We are bulding a membrane platform that industrializes these proteins to create separation products tailored for humankind’s most demanding processes. From delivering safe, clean water to recovering critical resources from waste streams, our goal is to unlock a new generation of membrane performance.
Breaking through the limitations of conventional membrane technology.
With an unstoppable curiosity and a commitment to tackling the most difficult challenges, we are delivering a technology that solves water purification challenges that conventional membrane technology cannot effectively address. By leveraging nature’s transport mechanisms, we are creating a new generation of products with enhanced selectivity and permeability to dramatically improve process performance.
The initial goal is to make advanced water treatment more accessible, cost-effective, and simple. However, we are not only working with water-selective proteins. The potential for our technology extends far beyond water, opening opportunities in resource recovery, energy and other sectors critical to human and planetary health.
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Water Purification
Water is critical to human life, industry, and progress. Growing populations, increased urbanization, and ever-more thirsty industries have intensified the demands on our water sources. This results in freshwater reserves being depleted and becoming even more polluted. Technologies exist to address these challenges, but can be difficult to implement because they are often energy-intensive, complex and expensive.
Our initial focus is on developing a water purification membrane that provides a meaningful performance advantage over conventional reverse osmosis, delivering measurable energy savings in comparison. This energy savings will translate into a more economical and more environmentally friendly solution for the demands of high-purity water applications. With the right configuration of biomimetic membranes using water selective transport proteins, we envision a process in which pretreatment steps are reduced, chemical consumption is decreased, and processes are simplified to provide fresh and high-quality water wherever it is needed.
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Resource Recovery
Every wastewater stream in the world – industrial effluent, desalination brine, mining waste, etc. – contains a veritable goldmine of critical resources which cannot be effectively extracted. At the same time, we continue to extract the same resources through drilling and mining further damaging the environment.
Whoever masters incorporating proteins into industrial applications will be able to solve this challenge. Filtration processes can help address this issue. Beyond aquaporins, there are channel proteins which can be employed for selectivity of a variety of other molecules of interest. We intend to employ those molecules to deliver tailored solutions that enable the separation of valuable molecules from waste streams.
Mastering difficult science to challenge the issues that challenge the world.
Expert knowledge in separation science to create innovative solutions.