Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Ardra Inc. is a biotechnology company that manufactures high-purity natural ingredients sustainably, which are suitable for use in natural flavours, perfumery and cosmetics formulations. Ardra's products, produced using fermentation of natural sugars, offer significant cost and sustainability advantages over traditional plant-based extractions. Additionally, since the products do not rely on botanical raw material, their supply is stable and devoid of seasonal variations. One difficulty in fermentation to produce these chemicals is the efficient and high-purity isolation of the desired product from the mixture of fermentation byproducts after fermentation is complete. As a result, Ardra is collaborating with Professor Jamie Cote and Professor David Guevara, from the School of Biological Sciences and Applied Chemistry (SBSAC) at Seneca. Professor Cote has over 5 years of experience in separations and purifications or organic chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and Professor Guevara has over 10 years of experience in natural products separations and analysis. Along with their research assistants from SBSAC, Professor Cote and Guevara will work closely with Ardra to understand the existing purification process and design and optimize a new purification procedure that will be more cost effective, but also provide a higher-purity product with less waste than the existing method. This resulting process will be directly implemented into Ardra's production line to provide immediate benefit to the company.