Miniaturization of substrates and further functionalization to improve separation ability are necessary to develop separation agents for liquid phase separation such as HPLC. Meanwhile, shorter operation time and lower costs are critical in the pharmaceutical, the environmental, and the synthetic chemistry field because of recent increase in number of analytes to be analyzed.
Then we focus on the inexpensive materials produced in factories, starting to develop porous macromolecules (spongy monolith) as a novel separation medium to realize high performance, high selectivity, low cost, and eco-friendly. To improve the performance especially for chromatographic method, we solved several problems such as complicating preparation of the purification process for biopharmaceutical as well as the low recovery rate, low reproducibility, and costly of separation analysis. Ultimately, we achieved a simple and rapid separation, which solved these problems.
In present, the multifunctioning detecting device for specific antibodies of an autoimmune disease and selective separation and concentration of nanoparticles based on chemical surface properties of the particles such as vesicles (exosome) and virus (SARS-CoV-2) have been worked on. What is more, we are starting a business venture from Kyoto university to develop our product as a super high-performance purification device of biopharmaceutical.