Interesting article - potential competitor??, page-17

The University of Texas researchers were not the first to be inspired by marine mussels to see the potential surface coating benefits of polydopamine, as reported in this 2007 article in Science Magazine.

It seems unlikely to me that polydopamine could act as an effective competitor for Alexium’s FR products for several practical reasons, some of which have been mentioned in earlier posts. Two important ones would relate to safety and scale.

As Parsifal has pointed out, it is questionable whether exposure to the dopamine-derived product over time would cause no harm to humans. Dopamine is a registered drug that has a number of medical applications. It does however possess negative side effects relating to kidney and heart functions. FR use of polydopamine in bedding material, for example, would likely lead to chronic low-dose exposure due to non-polymerised dopamine monomer or oligomers slowly leaching from the material.

This danger of toxicity has been outlined by ICU medical researchers who have recommended abandonment of low-dose use of dopamine to treat renal failure due to its observed side effects. [Link]
“While dopamine does cause a diuretic effect, it does very little to improve mortality, creatinine clearance, or the incidence of dialysis. Evidence is also growing of its adverse effects on the immune, endocrine, and respiratory systems. It may also potentially increase mortality in sepsis. It is the opinion of the authors that the practice of using low-dose dopamine should be abandoned.“

A more general and practical barrier to competition is the associated costs. Many of the raw materials used in the production of brominated flame retardants are moderately inexpensive chemicals sourced as readily available by-products from the petroleum industry. By comparison, dopamine is not naturally occurring in any appreciable quantity but requires relatively sophisticated (and therefore expensive) chemical synthesis from raw materials of limited availability. As an indicator of this, the best prices for purchase of its water soluble form from international chemical suppliers are around $6K per kilogram. While there would be economies of industrial scale, further costs would derive from the need to then convert this to the desired polymeric FR product.

When comparing this with Nick’s expectation of a single order for 500K kilograms of Alexiflam next January, it would appear that production of the dopamine-derived FR product at anything near industrial scale is highly unlikely, or many years away at best. The specialised use of polydopamine as a flame retardant in non-competitive low-scale areas such as electronics and intelligent materials would appear to be a more sensible target for its developers.