December 2024 ESRFnews

10

INSIGHT

What about today?

Commercial services are being

streamlined like never before. One

way this is happening is with the

matching of ESRF to industry

expectations, rather than vice versa.

“A company should be able to access

the ESRF as easily as buying a plane

ticket,” says Ed Mitchell, the head of

the now-titled Business Development

Office (BDO). The ESRF already

has a track record of accommodating

different working practices, for

example in its recent hosting of

industrial clients of the Swiss Light

Source during the latter’s shutdown

(see ESRFnews March 2024, p20),

but is aiming to become ever more

adaptable to industry needs.

How else is it transforming the

service?

Another way is through a growing

eco-system around the synchrotron,

drawing upon research and

technology organisations (RTOs)

and specialised science intermediaries

who help industrial clients get the

most from synchrotron access. But

perhaps the most dramatic change

is how the ESRF is leveraging both

the EBS and new developments in

automation to create super-high and

reliable throughputs. Last year, an

ESRF collaboration with the German

company BASF resulted in a system

for X-ray powder diffraction at the

ID31 beamline that can collect data

for 1,000 samples in less than an hour;

a start-up company, Momentum

Transfer, is now delivering it as a

unique service for various clients

For the BDOs Thanos Papazoglou

successes like these raise the

possibility of addressing not just

earlystage products but also those

at higher levels of technological

readinesswith the ESRF providing

quality assurance of manufactured

products We need our services to be

trustable repeatable and minimise

human error which is precisely what

industry demands he says

Jon Cartwright

oriented science mission. By the turn

of the millennium, however, there was

a greater awareness of the necessity

of synchrotron science for industrial

competitiveness, and in 2008,

when the ESRF began an upgrade

programme that would culminate with

the launch of the Extremely Brilliant

Source EBS the worlds brightest

synchrotron source industrial service

was made a core part of its mission

In addition to oneoff experiments

the ESRF began offering longterm

access to regular business users

and partaking in various European

projects such as InnovaXN see

p17 Later the ESRF found other

ways it could be commercially agile

for example sharing cuttingedge

technical knowledge

Didier Blanchard,

an engineer at the

start-up company

Momentum

Transfer, sets up a

new sample holder

in the uniquely

automated ID31

system which can

collect data from

1000 samples in

under an hour

Has the ESRF always supported

industry?

Yes. It was in 1994, the same year as

the ESRF began user operations, that

the ESRF scientist Jean Doucet set

up an Industry Coordination Office.

Tasked with managing corporate

access to the new synchrotron, the

office at first had only one client, a US

firm that wanted to exploit the novel

structural-biology capabilities of the

former ID02 beamline, where protein

crystallography had been set up as a

second station. Within a year, however,

the number of clients went up to seven,

and then interest began to snowball.

Today, the ESRF annually receives over

100 clients, big and small, who perform

experiments on many thousands of

samples. The commercial efforts bring

the ESRF some €2.5–3m a year, and

have a massive impact on industry in

Europe and beyond, helping to solve

myriad problems in product research

and development.

What sort of problems?

It may be easier to ask what has not

been tackled. Many of the biggest

clients are pharmas – AstraZeneca,

for instance, which regularly uses

the structural biology beamlines to

determine the structure and function

of new drugs for cancer, asthma, heart

disease and other conditions. Other

industrial users have come to the ESRF

for almost any application you can

think of: Renault, for the improvement

of electric car batteries; Proctor and

Gamble, for the development of

environmentally friendly washing

detergents Airbus for designing

radiationproof satellite electronics

Unilever for the development of

healthier substitutes for saturated fats

Jaguar Land Rover for studies into

safer carseat foams ECOCEM for

improving the aesthetics of lowcarbon

concrete and the list goes on

How have the ESRF services

changed over the years

In the beginning industrial services

were something of an added benefit

for the ESRFs more academically

Af ter 30 years providing industrial services, the ESRF is once again transforming how

commercial clients can benef it from its instrumentation and expertise.

The future of industry

E S R F / Y V E S W A T I E R