Bi-Rex, a project born in the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta" under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Mele, after being selected among the winners of the 11th edition of Switch2Product | Innovation Challenge has won the € 30k Grant and the acceleration path within Polihub.

Thanks to the skills acquired, Bi-Rex obtained a pre-seed grant of € 160k from Poli360, an investment fund managed by 360 Capital Partners, a leading European venture capital company.

Bi-rex is an innovative and eco-sustainable treatment of differents biomass deriving from agri-food processing normally considered and managed as waste, in order to recover high added value products, such as cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, chitin, silica. The project is fully part of the circular economy, also recognized by Legambiente with the special mention in the Innovazione Amica dell’ambiente 2019 Award.

The pre-seed grant will allow to validate the proof of concept by tackling the scale up from the laboratory to the pilot plant. This will allow to study technical feasibility and economic sustainability on an industrial scale.

The project was born from the union of two research projects of the group of Prof. Andrea Mele: study of new green and non-toxic solvents, and study of biopolymers, in particular of cellulose. Bi-Rex was born from two projects led by Greta Colombo Dugoni, PhD student of the XXXIII cycle, and Monica Ferro, post-Doc, and  despite being born only a year and a half ago, led to 4 patents and the winning of important funding.