Academic PoCs

This project aims to address the problem of wastewater pollution caused by contrast agents used in medical diagnostics. Although essential for improving the visualisation of tissues and organs in X-ray or MRI imaging, contrast agents containing iodine and heavy metals, such as gadolinium, are a significant source of environmental pollution. Once administered, these agents are excreted through urine and end up in the wastewater system. It is estimated that several hundred million doses of contrast agents are administered each year for X-ray tomography alone, and their increasing use has led to the detection of significant amounts of pollutants in the environment, potentially posing a risk to human health and ecosystems.     Contact: Contact person Angelo Bifone E-mail angelo.bifone@unito.it  Tel. 0116706437 3351270982  

Whey is the main waste product of the dairy industry. Worldwide, 160 Mton/year of it is produced, 8 in Italy alone. Due to its high organic load, whey cannot be discharged directly into surface waters. The recovery of high feed value proteins by means of ultrafiltration is often carried out to valorise this effluent. Nevertheless, the residual liquid (permeate) still has too high a load due mainly to the lactose content. The permeate is often concentrated to facilitate its transport to purifiers, reaching lactose concentrations of up to 160 g/L. REFINEMENT develops two technologies to create additional value from permeate: ethanol production by fermentation and surfactant synthesis by biocatalysis. Furthermore, it assesses how the integration of the two processes into a single ‘no-waste’ biorefinery can increase sustainability and facilitate technology transfer and business development of the developed know-how. In particular, it studies how the effluents of the two processes, which are currently unused, can be further exploited: the lactose residue at the end of fermentation can be used as a substrate for biotransformations, while the glucose-containing effluent from the biotransformations can be exploited as a medium for the preparation of the bacterial inoculum for pre-fermentation. Thanks to the synergy between the two processes so far considered separately, further added value will be generated from the up-cycling of the by-products by enhancing the circularity of the two processes.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most powerful clinical imaging techniques for diagnosing various diseases such as cancer, neurological diseases, metabolic diseases and cardiovascular diseases. Approximately 40% of MRI scans use Gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCA) to enhance diagnostic information and detect pathological tissue. In Europe, more than 25 million MRI scans are performed per year, of which about 10 million use GBCA (a quarter of the world total). GBCAs are excreted from the human body through urine and end up in city sewers.  

Through the 2i3T incubator, a business acceleration process has been launched for the foundation of a university spin-off offering an innovative service for the automatic measurement of the gaseous exchange of water vapour and carbon dioxide between plant and atmosphere (Plant Flow Solutions, PFS). The PoC aims to support a project that will enable a technological advancement capable of redefining the applicability of these measurements, giving them all the characteristics of modern phenotyping systems, which will support the scientific basis of the nascent university spin-off.  

The need to ensure access to raw materials (RM), including critical materials (CRM), has stimulated EU policies to find alternative and supplementary sources to exploit. RM, secondary raw materials (SRM) and sometimes CRM can be recovered from old landfills and flowing waste from different production cycles, applying landfill mining and circular economy approaches respectively.  

The biomedical research and industry use cell cultures extensively, generating significant amounts of waste. BioReMediA was born from reflections on the economic and environmental impact caused by the daily disposal of large quantities of Exhausted Cell Culture Media (ECCM). Inspired by the exceptional versatility of microalgae and their ability to decontaminate heavily polluted matrices (such as wastewater and industrial effluents), Biomedica aims to develop strategies to recycle this waste into supplements that can efficiently grow microalgae. In detail, the project aims at: reducing the impact of liquid waste from the bio-medical research/industry; activating circular economy pathways by fostering sustainability in the same supply chains; increasing yields in microalgae cultivation for bioremediation applications through the use of ECCM-derived products; developing methods to obtain high value-added products (lipids, proteins, pigments) from microalgae with a cost-effective approach.

BiOCARE recovers cutin from agro-food waste, transforming it into a medical fabric with the aim of recovering (upcycling) food waste, resulting in environmental and economic benefits.

According to the preliminary environmental report of December 2021, which is part of the strategic environmental assessment procedure implemented by the Ministry of Ecological Transition (MITE) in cooperation with the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA), the annual production of waste in our country amounts to approximately 184 million tonnes. Of this, about 30 million are from urban sources and the remaining share (more than 80 %) comes from production activities. The largest production, for the latter category, is in Lombardy and Piedmont. In this context and in accordance with the aims of Spoke 2 of the NODES project, this project proposal is positioned and developed.

Plastics are now a necessary technology, but they are increasingly the focus of attention due to their direct effects on the environment and the land-water ecosystem, as well as the use of petroleum derivatives required for their production. In this project, a technology already patented by our research group as a resin for 3D printing will be optimised for industrial applications. The material under study in this project is a polymerisable, thermosetting bio-resin under curing conditions. All protocols used will follow Green Chemistry standards, producing a >80 % bio-based resin with low or no VOC emissions. This will give us an ecological advantage over current resins that often contain hazardous compounds such as styrene. Possible applications for the product will be wood flatting/impregnating (light-curing resin) and intumescent paints for fire-fighting use with a high filler content (heat-curing resin). The latter use is of particular interest due to the high heat resistance and non-melting nature of the cured product.

The proposing research group has patented a simple and inexpensive yet effective portable procedure for the determination of total mercury (HgTOT), inorganic Hg (HgIN) and methylmercury (CH3Hg) in fish products.  

The system stems from the need to reduce the overall environmental impact of cars during their lifetime by mitigating secondary emissions from braking systems, which, for the latest generation of combustion vehicles, produce a portion of particulate matter comparable to that of the engine itself.

The objective of this project is to develop a new mechanism called 'Infinite Stroke System - ISS'.

The project aims to use “marmettola” as an ingredient in the preparation of two-component grout (2CG), a technology used for backfilling in the mechanised excavation of tunnels using shielded machines. The development of the idea makes it possible to improve the quality of the "tunnel product," durability and hydraulic sealing capacity (thus reducing long-term maintenance) on the one hand, and facilitate the disposal of a waste from the mining industry in a virtuous process of circular economy on the other. The goal of the PoC is to take the technology to the level of industrial demonstration by experimenting with the preparation of backfilling mortar using turbo mixers commonly used on tunnel construction sites.