Versarien PLC (LON:VRS) Chief Executive Officer Neill Ricketts caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss their new healthcare graphene project
Q1: Now Neill, you’ve put out some exciting news of a new project that you’re involved in, can you explain the background to the new healthcare graphene project that you announced?
A1: Yes, sure. This is a fantastic opportunity for the business, we obviously have an amazing relationship with the University of Manchester and the National Graphene Institute, they’re working with 4 multi-national healthcare companies to look at actually how these new materials that we’re helping to design will be used in future projects in order to cure things like cancer, dementia and diabetes, this is ground-breaking stuff. It is slightly blue sky in that it’s a much longer type project for us but one that we haven’t got any experience previously which is why it’s so important to have such great partners.
Q2: So which areas in the bio-medical market will you be focussing on?
A2: Well there’s been already a fair bit of research on how graphene and the two-dimensional materials can be used in the next generation of pharmaceuticals so I would imagine that this partner is going to be focusing on that. Our role in this project is to supply our material and make sure that the project has access to some of the best materials to enable success in the role out of this type of technology. So we’re very very keenly focussed on just supplying the material and working with the academics to ensure that that material will work in those applications, it’s quite good that it’s not all that onerous on the company but it is a great place to be.
Q3: How will the healthcare laboratory and multi-national partners that you’ve got on board help to progress the project?
A3: It’s really really key to have some great partners and although we can’t say who these partners are at the moment we know they’re substantial in the marketplace and that means that they already have a good idea of who the final customers are, what the demands are for these particular industries, something that we couldn’t as a small company even hope to compete with. So having those guys on board and steering the project means that we should be able to get these products to market much much quicker rather than trying to do this all of this ourselves.
Q4: Do you see further opportunities to access grant monies as you’ve done with 2D-Health here?
A4: I think that now we’ve been able to secure the patents on our process and that we’re starting to get greater publicity of our materials I think these opportunities are coming knocking at our door, this particular one is extremely high profile, I mean I don’t think you can get any higher profile than saving people’s lives but there are a multitude of other applications for these type of technologies. We’re looking forward to really getting to meet a lot of these buyers and a lot of these users of these future technologies in order to look at these projects as they become available.
