Science Park companies stir the world

VLCI’s fast robotic screening approach is the world’s first – and for many years only – R&D services that assists customers in finding proper ingredients to create stable and effective product recipes. EAL’s computer simulation models are unparalleled in their ability to capture the properties and interactions between product ingredients down to their microstructural levels. Jurjen: “We enable an accurate prediction of product behavior under fluctuating conditions. Our joint capabilities answer the needs of the research & development labs to create recipes way more efficiently.”

Amsterdam Science Park Chemistry

Sander: “It all started with hearing about EAL’s predictive modeling capabilities from a person at our shared Science Park office space in one of the multi-tenant buildings. Shortly after that we met at a fair, chatted and found that, together, we have a unique proposition.” They decided to join forces, resulting in a collaboration offering multinationals in food, personal care, cosmetics and specialty chemicals a unique R&D service.

Predictive chemistry

Jurjen: “We recognized the cumbersome trial-and-error complexity of the research labs. Example: one of our customers produces a high sugar-containing product sold and loved all over the world. Modern consumers demand for lower sugar products. Unfortunately, a reduction of the sugar amount will influence aspects such as binding capabilities, thereby destabilizing the product. It typically will take hundreds of experiments, many years and significant investments before an acceptable product is developed or ingredient replacement is established. The applied predictive chemistry of VLCI combined with property modelling of EAL offers the desired solution for effective product developments.”

High speed experiments

Sander: “Our robot is capable of preparing hundreds of samples simultaneous, to give parameters to ingredients.” With these parameters, EAL’s simulation models can experiment endlessly at high speed under various conditions to develop specific recipes. Jurjen: “Using a supercomputer, for example the SURFSara system next door at Science Park, we can perform hundreds of experiments in a matter of hours or days. Final laboratory validation is only required for the few successful formulas.” Jurjen: “The recipe adjustment may reduce from five to eight years down to one or two years. We offer our customers huge reductions in time, materials and investments.”