Rose-Hulman Ventures News

Camile President and CEO Spencer Vawter (right)
explains a company product to Rose-Hulman
Ventures VP Brij Khorana at Camile's Indianapolis
headquarters.

Camile Products, a high-tech firm in Indianapolis, is collaborating with Rose-Hulman Ventures to build a scientific instrument for the life sciences and chemical industries. The outcome of this effort will be a high throughput chemical synthesizer. This innovative product will allow chemists to optimize new chemical entities faster, shortening the product development time and increasing corporate revenues and profits.

“By taking advantage of engineering expertise at Rose-Hulman Ventures, we’ll be able to bring this product to market in half the time originally estimated, states Spencer Vawter, president and CEO of Camile. "Speed to market is critical in our marketplace, which is characterized by exploding demand and little supply.”

Often promising new chemical and pharmaceutical products get stuck in process development, where it can take 2-4 years to run a series of tests before the compound can be made in large enough quantities for commercialization.

“This traditional manual process is quickly becoming the bottleneck in new product introductions, subsequently delaying revenue streams and profits, says Vawter. Investments made in technology 5-10 years ago further upstream in the development cycle, plus the new work generated by the Humane Genome project, have created more work for process development chemists,” he stated.

“These chemists desperately need automated tools designed specifically to meet their needs. Currently, these tools don’t exist,” Vawter emphasized. “Not only will this new chemical synthesizer help increase productivity and throughput in the labs, but it will also position Camile as the only company with a platform of products that can handle the work flow from drug discovery to manufacturing,” he said.

Rose-Hulman also benefits from this win-win partnership. The product development and design has begun in Rose-Hulman Ventures, a high-technology incubator and product development center funded by a $29.7 million grant from the Lilly Endowment last year.

Rose-Hulman Ventures will provide services valued at $500,000 in exchange for a convertible debt instrument from Camile, according to Brij Khorana, Rose-Hulman Ventures vice president.

“The development of the high throughput chemical synthesizer will provide an excellent opportunity for several chemical, electrical, applied optics, and mechanical engineering students to put their classroom knowledge to work on real projects and gain invaluable experience,” states Khorona. “The team of students will be led by eight full-time engineering professionals and augmented by several faculty members.”

The collaboration achieves three major objectives set by Rose-Hulman Ventures. They are to provide faculty and students with cutting edge professional practice; to help retain more Rose-Hulman graduates in Indiana; and to provide more high level career opportunities in Indiana. Currently 18% of Camile’s Indianapolis-based workforce are Rose-Hulman graduate. This project is expected to generate another eight jobs requiring advanced technical degrees.

Founded in 1988, Camile has a client list that includes most of the world’s top pharmaceutical and chemical companies, including Eli Lilly, SmithKline Beecham, GlaxoWellcome, Merck, Roche, Dow Chemical and DuPont Chemical and many more. Camile designs programs and systems that have helped process development chemists realize reliable and reproducible laboratory and pilot plant control. Camile delivers innovative products and services that help the customers reduce their product development time and bring products to market faster.

Rose-Hulman Ventures is a technology-based incubator and product development center that is attracting and retaining high-tech businesses that will create economic growth and increase career opportunities to keep more technical professionals in Indiana.