I-Corps: Light patternable mesoporous material

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to enable significant commercial opportunities in the area of small molecule separation. To capture this opportunity, the potential of this I-Corps project focuses on unprecedented demand of the purification market. Although the emergence of new biomarkers, drug development and point-of-care testing can improve outcomes, the purification step is hindered by requiring lab-scale equipment to separate the impurities and cannot be easily integrated into functional device architectures. Thus, processable mesoporous material potentially has significant need and may have direct impact on wide range of industries including healthcare, biomedical, waste and pollution. These techniques provide a universal route to integrate purification within devices and also provide a platform for multi-detection or diagnosis which is not available yet in the market.This I-Corps project further develops a technology to process mesoporous materials as an enabling platform for a broad range of applications including purification, sensing and bioreactors. Despite the early advances in synthesis of mesoporous materials, technological applications have fallen far behind expectation due, in large part, to the fact that mesoporous materials are formed as powders. This technology addresses this key challenge by fabricating the mesopores in-situ by leveraging unique photo programmable precursor chemistry. The technology enables fabrication of hierarchical mesoporous structures in which the internal micropore structure and macroscopic structure of the materials can be precisely defined.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.