EnergyEne gets grant to focus on guayule latex

WOOSTER, Ohio—EnergyEne Inc. is receiving nearly $650,000 in grant money to help develop a viable market for latex taken from the guayule shrub grown domestically.

The Wooster firm, formed by Katrina Cornish, is receiving a new small business grant of $648,557 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The money, offered through the Small Business Innovation Research Program, will further efforts to use the material to create gloves that protect medical workers from radiation.

"I have spent most of my career trying to get domestic rubber production going because it's so idiotic for us to be at such risk of loss of this critical raw material, especially over the last few years where we have been making enemies left, right and center in Asia," said Cornish, a professor at Ohio State University's Wooster campus. "They could just cut us off from natural rubber if they chose to."

EnergyEne sees the radiation attenuation market as a potential fit for gloves made from guayule latex instead of the latex tapped from rubber trees or synthetic latex.

Guayule is a shrub that grows in the Southwest and is viewed as a domestic source of rubber that ultimately could be commercialized on a large scale. Many believe it has the potential to lessen the country's dependence on foreign rubber.

EnergyEne is many years into its research and development surrounding guayule rubber and already has a pilot plant that uses a batch process. The new funding will allow operations to move toward commercialization, Cornish said in a recent interview.

She sees multiple pathways to success with the project, including development of commercial scale plants, licensing of technology and even an outright sale of the technology.

"It will certainly get us to the approval process. And that objective basically ends with submitting the application to the FDA. And then we're also doing the testing device and the competitive analysis and market research," Cornish said.

About $60,000 of the grant money will be used on machinery to test finished gloves made by EnergyEne—essentially a mechanical hand that will be used to test the strength and properties of finished goods. Cornish expects development of the initial device will lead to similar, less-expensive models being installed at glove manufacturing sites for quality control.

"If somebody wants to license it, they could do that. And, if not, we can probably produce it ourselves for the first couple of years and then, hopefully, divest it or spin it off," Cornish said about the entire guayule glove project.

It's not uncommon for academic researchers, in this case with guayule, to prove the viability of an idea and then turn the project over to the business community for future development. The thinking is the higher costs of producing gloves with guayule latex can be absorbed because medical grade radiation attenuation gloves are priced much higher than surgical and exam gloves.

Guayule currently faces a significant cost disadvantage compared to hevea harvested from rubber trees. So EnergyEne is focusing on a high-profit market where margins are higher to help fund the higher costs.

"This premium niche market allows guayule to be profitably produced and processed on a small scale," according to a description of the project from the USDA. "The more expensive GNRL (guayule natural rubber latex) is directly offset by eliminating the current need to wear a secondary medical-grade glove to protect against blood-borne pathogens during medical procedures. The need for both a medical and a separate RA glove can be eliminated if a GNRL RA glove is worn because the GNRL RA glove meets both RA and pathogen protection needs."

Creation of a viable market, in this case gloves, for guayule rubber is seen as a gateway to developing broader demand and applications for the material.

"EnergyEne discovered an unmet need for a higher performing natural latex-based, medical RA glove, which can only be met by guayule latex film's unique combination of high strength, elasticity, softness and high filler loading capacity. Manufacture and sale of first-to-market, high-profit margin (e.g. niche market) guayule latex products, like this RA glove, can be addressed with latex production from small acreages and pilot plant production. Production of these gloves provides the initial cornerstone to our longer-term goal of guayule expansion, additional investment, and the massive agricultural rural development that guayule farming, latex and co-products will provide across the southwestern U.S.," a description of the project states.

Cornish, as a recognized expert in the field of alternative sources of latex, sees this project as a potential capstone to her career in academics and rubber.

"I believe so strongly that the U.S. must have its own domestic sources of natural rubber production that, succeeding with this, I can see where it would pave the way to actually allow that to happen. And in my lifetime I would see an entire industry built up around these premium specialty latex products. It would have made my career worthwhile," she said.

The history of domestic rubber development is full of people who have tried really hard "but didn't quite make it. … I want to be that she tried really hard and look what happened," Cornish said.