 All right, and I think I think we're live. All right, you want me to start with this? Yeah, global health impacts of nanotechnology law. Hey, so please introduce, introduce yourself. It's a mysterious world. Yes, I'm Dr. Elise Spitzans and I'm very, very pleased and honored that this is my 10th time presenting at the annual conference of nanotechnology here in the University of Aristotle in Greece. And it's been a wonderful, wonderful decade because there's been so much growth in the field. It's been very exciting to be part of this story. So I have just a few souvenirs here from the many years. I have the first abstract book from 2012 and already the conference was nine years old the first time I came. And I just introduced a little taste of the idea that there's law impacting nanotechnology. And nanotechnology, they said, well, what's that going to do with the law? And actually I ended up writing an entire doctorate on the question of what does that have to do with the law. I wrote for the Geneva School of Diplomacy, but somehow magically got an award from the University of Ozan, a university-wide award for the best research in social medicine and prevention. For the first doctorate looking at the legal issues in nanotechnology. And I want to credit Sturios and his team because they let me bring the ideas here and discuss them with scientists and get feedback on what made sense and what didn't. You have books also, right? I have books also, yes. So the most recent book is the French version of global health impacts of nanotechnology law. And this book is nanotechnology pour tous, la révolution scientifique de notre époque. It's a slight update from the first book because so much happened in 2018. And I want to thank my partner and spouse, Dominique Shawla, who wrote the back and discusses the importance of looking at nanotechnology law as a sort of rules of the road of how to proceed. And you can see that even the simple cover from 2012 until a few years later, we've already got more complexity at nanotechnology and more going on. And the thicker book to the point that the book is so big now, we just put it on the back. What is an abstract book? What is that about? Oh, it's a marvelous document. It's when you come to a conference like this and there are thousands of people and you have to decide where you're going to spend your time. And so it describes what each speech is going to be about to help you decide which days you're going to see. It takes a lot of work to compile this. It does. It does. They have an entire organizing committee. And I think part of the hard work is the fact that you have people from all over the world in different languages, different universities, different institutions sending their work from different fields. You want to get them in there in time so they fit this. And the schedule is very, very full. And even now the schedule is very, very full. And I spoke about legal implications of nanomedicine in public health right there in 2012. And I was the only lawyer at the time and I still am. We still don't have lawyers coming to nanotechnology. And that's something we have to work on because as Stereos pointed out in his plenary session yesterday, the social impacts of nanotechnology. Now that we have the long list of disciplines that work together to create nanotechnology and we've always been looking a little bit at what that means in terms of society, equity, bioethics and the law. Now the time has come to really start looking at those impacts. And I propose that we need a workshop protecting posterity and looking at what it is that nanotechnology is doing in society. So I would call that proposed workshop protecting posterity, nanotechnology saving the world. And we could look at the disciplines but also we should look at what theologians have to say about nanotechnology. Is this advancing some of the religious views? Is it a tool for making the world much more the way the divine plan they believe in that existed? And I think it's possible. For example, Lady Gaga did that marvelous concert in the middle of COVID-19 where she brought together 60 million people from 100 countries. This is bringing the world together in ways that technology is doing that nobody could have done before. And that she could have Paul McCartney singing in his kitchen at the same time as the Rolling Stones air drumming and those guys don't even get along. And everybody in the world had the opportunity for free to participate in that concert. That's a gift of technology. But a theologian might think that this is something that's really bringing the world towards unity. So we need to look at that. We need to look at, of course, the laws. And I will talk more about the law in a second. Is there a lot of regulation or not yet in this field? Yes, a lot of regulation not yet. First of all, there's always the fundamental norms of society. And one of the things that I discovered in working on the book Global Health Impact of Nanotechnology Law is that the concept of universality in international law is a very big player here. That there are common needs and basic human needs all around the world addressed throughout the world in different jurisdictions. And those rules were always there. Scientists like to call that the precautionary principles, which is a consensus idea. But very few countries have actually codified the precautionary principles. What they do instead is they operationalize precautionary principles. They make them happen by having laws that protect people and do things. But actually in some countries, like my home country, there's a tendency not to regulate nanotechnology. And yet in my country of adopted citizenship, my inherited brick citizenship, the EU is massively and proactively writing many, many rules. And there are exciting rules about nanostructures and food and rules about how to use nanotechnology safely while looking at the environment and consistently promoting innovation. So yes, there is no nanotechnology law in some places. And yes, there is nanotechnology law growing like mushrooms in a whole bunch of other places. So it's not like a car bar country where people can just do whatever they want and nobody's checking? Well, people like to think that. But that's not how the law really works. What it really works is that it's a sort of a box. And in that box you can do what you want. And so long as you don't hurt people too much and you don't violate too many laws, you're probably okay. But we're beginning to see a much more focused and sharper focus on what the law wants nanotechnology to do. It's important to remember also that if we didn't have fundamental laws permitting the research and development, we wouldn't have the joyous, cool toys that nanotechnology gives us today. In the 1990s, President Clinton had the National National Nanotechnology Initiative started. And their report in 1999 gave birth to a bunch of legislation. And in the EU, there's funding for all kinds of wonderful projects. Those are laws that make that happen. So in order to even do the basic research, there's laws that have to answer. It's always true that if you don't want to obey the law, you can try to get away with it. But it's becoming less and less true that you will be able to do so. Because some of the stuff these guys are talking about here can change the world and make a huge impact. But you need to have the funding and the regulation and everything just helping to push it along and make it happen sooner. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the talk I gave yesterday was about 3D printing. And at the time that nanotechnology was starting, people were talking about 3D printing. Would it happen or not? And what we discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic was that people were 3D printing masks and ventilator parts and some of the organic parts that they needed for people in hospitals or in points of care. An easy example is if you had a dentist who needed to do implants and the lines of supplies were frozen during the pandemic, during the height of the pandemic, we're still in the pandemic, but we're in a much quieter phase now. And at that height, it wasn't possible to get supplies so they could 3D print the teeth that they wanted to implant. Well, that sounds lovely. It's a beautiful promise. It's a beautiful promise. We have everything that that patient needs to try and get them well. But here's the problem. When you do that, you push aside a lot of pre-existing structures. You push aside all the quality control and inspection that happens in the manufacturing plant, in the packaging, in the transportation. If it crosses a border, then the customs people look at it very carefully. Maybe there's medical device law, food and drug law, or just plain customs law. And all that inspection gets torn away because you're 3D printing, you download your information, you make your recipe, and then you give it to the patient. The same magic that gives it to the patient also very anarchistically takes away our understanding of who does something if something goes wrong. Is it just because the patient was so close to death that they died? Or is it because something was wrong in that 3D printing? How would you ever know and how would you ever be able to do something about it? So we're at a very important crossroads because the law does have the ability to answer these questions. There's always been law about what you give the patients and when they're in an emergency, if you can do things for them without their informed consent, their permission. And if you do and you do it wrong, what are the consequences? That's always existed. But we as a society have to start making choices about what it is that we want to allow and what we want to be very strict about and not care about at all with impunity. Because there are some huge challenges in the world and maybe nanotechnology has a role in all of it. Nanotechnology is capable of saving just about all of it. But it's a question of choices. The easy one, the one that we're going to look at at the European Scientific Institute in November of 22 is about food. Because nanotechnology and food is something that not many people think about or know and it affects everybody, every day. Everybody needs to eat. And nanotechnology has been involved in creating what's called nanopesticides that you can actually grow on a plant, a pesticide that you remove in a harvest and nanostructures in pesticide that make stronger and more efficient use of the pesticide so you use less toxic material and less destruction to the land. And then of course the way we transport food if you have silver lining in the trucks, the refrigerators and the things like that that protects the food. You have packaging that's stronger. When I was a kid plastic meant something was cheap and easy to break. And now if I try to break the plastic on the cover of this book it's not easily done. That's because carbon nanotubes are reinforcing that plastic. So we have better packaging. What does that mean? It means it's lighter to ship the food, we can take longer to ship the food, we can store it and that means the insurance cost goes down. Well those are all really cool benefits but those benefits each one of those is a trade off. Each one of those has a cost to society that we need to think about. And my mission, my passion for this is that there is a sense of justice and equity that people will look at these health issues and have the opportunity as stakeholders to participate in how we're going to do this for the next generation or 100 years. These are very important questions that are impacting daily life. Thanks to nanotechnology we have MRNA. Some people don't want a vaccine but for those that do the vaccine exists. Thanks to nanotechnology we can feed everybody and we can have supply lines for distribution but is that what we want as a society? And if we do that, what are we trading off? Maybe we'll have only four types of ice cream instead of the thousands of flavors because we'll have an efficient way of feeding everybody. Or maybe we'll have thousands more flavors we never dreamed about. When we talk about 3D printing I focused yesterday on medical devices but in fact we 3D print food already in the industrial companies and many people believe that 3D printers for food will soon be as commonplace as your laptop. And what kind of choices do we want to make about that? We can feed everybody. We need to think about how we want to feed everybody. What we want to feed them. Do we want that food to be the conduit for bringing them their medicine? Do we want that to be a pleasure? A comfort food as we call it? Do we want it only to be nutritious? We can make gluten free food for one person and then high carb for the guy that's running and we can do all of this through nanotechnology. We can print the exact portion that's perfect and healthy and customized for every person. Yes, we can. And delicious. Yes, and delicious. And the people that use it in 3D printing they say it's delicious. What I believe is whether or not it's delicious that it's already been creeping into the pre-packaged food economy and industrial, commercial food the food factories, if you will. And if that's the case then that part of the question is solved. The question is what do we want to do with that? Do we want everyone to have customized food? Do we want the cultural diversity of having different foods from different countries or different ways of eating? Do we want everyone to meet at a certain nutritional level? Or do we want to say to some people maybe they don't need to meet that they can do something else. And what will happen to fresh food? Will there be fresh food? Will we want fresh food? Maybe it's undesirable. These are societal choices. My mission is to try and give people the tools around this to look first of all at the law without becoming aware. Law impacts our daily life. Law has to do with if you have electricity in the law electricity is allowed to travel and whether it's protected in all kinds of ways or just random static electricity. Law is everywhere and the science of nanotechnology has given us beautiful products now for almost two decades and we have these products and we use them but people don't really have access to the time and the information to try and sort it out for themselves. So in my writing I take on these very complicated areas like food there isn't a country that doesn't regulate food. Even a country that doesn't believe health is a human right or that there's a human right to food will nonetheless regulate food its quality its content its subsidies its import and its export. These are things that we regulate all the time as humans. Things like food that's also at the same time very mundane very ordinary very essential for everyone. In my opinion what people need is access to information that provides a basic idea about the law and a basic idea of the nanotechnology and synthesizes that with the health concerns and the economic concerns and then you can have a conversation about what is it you want to do in society. I guess there must be a lot of big organizations big companies or universities or startups they do all kinds of new ideas new research new visions and then if they wait until later to figure out if it's legal. But in France they have changed that the new approach you know the French when they eat the traditional meal they take a little pause and they digest it and then they go on to the next this is traditional pre-COVID pre-fast food where you run to the restaurant before your time runs out that you're allowed to be on the street but the traditional meal of taking a very long time and preparing it very carefully and consistent with that paradigm the French have put into their research grant process what's called lab to market and you have to think carefully about how you propose to use the commercialization of the nanomaterial in order to get the grant to do research now this is a very important difference because as you say we invent these really cool things we don't know where they'll plug into society once they exist they take on a life of their own but in fact we use them in a bunch of places without having thought through the consequences and the consequences don't have to be big catastrophic consequences they can be little things if you have titanium dioxide making toothpaste fluffier and whiter so that people are more willing to brush their teeth which is a social good then the next thing is what isn't in that titanium dioxide is there something that should be limited in quantity when you have titanium dioxide in donut or in whipped cream and it's not up to the maker of the toothpaste it's up to the person that's putting together all those uses at the same time the individual or the planner if it's a person that's in a setting where people are planning things for you so we have to ask a lot more questions but I think these are really cool toys I don't think it needs, we don't do it I think we need to take the time to do it rationally and then we'll have some marvelous results what about China, India Italy everybody has their own big pile of laws and stuff right? and maybe some of them wants to be more liberal about some of the ideas than others that's where people might go or do you have to coordinate everything from an international organization that somehow spreads out the regulation globally fortunately we don't yet have an international nanotechnology organization because there would be nothing outside of its jurisdiction all the pretty equipment that you're using is nano-enabled the fact that we can talk on the web with people of the world is using telecommunications that are nano-enabled and this is very very important so fortunately we don't have a massive nanotechnology governance but what I've discovered in my research is that we have lots and lots of laws all over the place we probably even though people tend not to know that there's law and nanotechnology we probably have more law than we need actually because we have so many laws in so many places and we have to start sorting out which are the laws that work for which purpose and which are the laws that we want to have ruled and this is very different than your traditional what's called conflict laws analysis in law because conflict of laws is usually very specific to a circumstance and in conflict of laws it's just what people read it's not that one law is better than the other but we actually have several parallel models where we need to start thinking about choosing which model we like better and we need harmonization because if you don't harmonize if you don't bring together the laws then trade becomes impossible I have a really cool food that people need in a country that's at war and I could get it to them using nanotechnology but the law is so inconsistent that in one country they say this food is possible to eat and in another country they say you can't eat it well you have that then you have a conflict of law that is resolved that nanotechnology spotlights that that problem may have existed elsewhere but that's a conflict of law and it's easier to have in the United States of America the food drug and drug administration where my wonderful tax dollars pay we have something called the generally recognized as safe we have the grass list and on that list is titanium dioxide which is used in toothpaste cream donuts and a whole variety of household things cleaners skin creams it makes things white and fluffy and attractive and consumers like it and according to the grass list if it's less than 1% of the components of the thing that you're looking at then in fact you don't need to worry about the presence of the nano scale because it's generally recognized as safe and yet the European Food Safety Authority which is a very well respected body has said even though we don't have the power to ban things and that's a very nice legal question why they don't have the power should they have the power what would they do if they had that power well EFSA European Food Safety Authority has said that at the nano scale titanium dioxide is dangerous and should be banned but they don't have the authority to ban it so if somebody needs food somewhere do they accept the generally recognized as safe food with the titanium dioxide or do they worry the way EU is saying you ought to worry this is a very important conflict it's not about sovereignty that one country has the right to tell people what to do and the other doesn't it's a scientific question that has very important legal economic and health implications and citizens need to become sufficiently informed to participate in that debate without getting into anything controversial the last couple years has shown that scientists don't necessarily agree they don't have to agree there's no monolith the question isn't whether they agree the question is whether you can understand what they're saying if you understand what they're saying then you know what to do with that information when they send out confusing information on a top down way I'm the scientist I know listen to me this is very bad even if they're right not only that it sort of deprives the individual of choices and because they're being told what to do in places where they might have autonomy and vaccines but more importantly it deprives the individual and the society of the ability to really make that subtle analysis because maybe it's great most of the time and then there's one or two times when it's really a very bad idea and the individual has to have enough information to make that decision properly all the good times can be erased by two or three really bad decisions so just saying well we've done it a million times and it's fine isn't an answer the scientists need to behave more responsibly they need to be giving information in a manner that not only respects the intelligence of the recipients but actually makes it useful in more than one context so that they can see what happens next when that information is out there and lawyers are just as bad as anything to we tell people oh there's no constitutional basis for this case but we don't tell people read the constitution here are the lines of the constitution we're talking about the constitution in this country is different than that country and how does that play together when somebody goes across borders do they still have the same rights etc so the fault is not that the information is bad or good the information is neutral the fault is that it's packaged cruel it's presented in a way that's definitive and you must accept it without allowing for the nuances that are the parts of everyday life and that my goal is to make people want to have access to that and to try to make some of those complicated ideas more accessible there are some things that remain complex but there are some things where if you think about it carefully you can distill it to a few important concepts and then individuals can make choices and have really intelligent responses without feeling that something is taken away from them you know a lot of the people that don't want to be vaccinated feel that their right to say no has been taken away from them well maybe if they have specific information they may make that whole analysis very different instead of that emotional response that this is my right not to do this maybe they would think about it as a different body of rights when you think of nanotechnology the word is it kind of like branding or marketing is it the what you're talking about is relevant for all the chemistry and medicine has been going on for centuries so it is the nanotechnology has been going on for hundreds of years well when I started in this field and it's a really marvelous piece of good luck that I was invited to this field by Dr. John Howard who is the head of the National Institute of Occupational Safety in the United States when I was invited to this field nanotechnology was much less prevalent but it was still quite prevalent and if you just I spent a great deal of time defining what is nanotechnology so one thing that it is is if you took this one strand of my hair can you see one strand of my hair here? I'm trying to focus this one strand has a diameter that is 100,000 nanometers that's how small we're talking about we're not talking about the molecular level nanomaterials maybe 50 or 60 molecules we're not talking about the atomic level and we're not talking about ultra fine because that's too big but we're talking about the nanoscale in a way that's really fascinating first of all from the point of view of the science it was called the revolution right away because matter behaves differently at the nanoscale compared to how matter behaves in what we now call both the carbon nanotubes that are wrapping this book if they were just carbon you could have them in a pencil you could have them in emissions that you're trying to capture but at the nanoscale they behave very differently carbon in particular was fascinating because carbon has always been very recognized as safe when I was a child there were sheets of carbon and if you wanted to make a copy of something you put the sheet of paper of carbon between two other sheets of paper and you wrote and the carbon came out on the second sheet it was safe everybody did it so there was no law regulating the use of carbon at the nanoscale which we now know it does marvelous things but also may migrate into the skin or lungs and cause cancers we don't know yet how much when why or how but we know this possibility exists and we know that we have to start regulating how to use carbon and in fact when reach was written the European law on protecting people from chemical hazards in 2011 it did not mention carbon but by 2020 it had a separate protocol just for carbon so things that were safe were in this odd limbo because they behaved so differently gold the only thing dangerous about this gold ring is that it makes me marry to somebody and whatever that means but gold at the nanoscale explodes and we use it to make the communications rapidly with lots of information so first you had this change in the science that we were rewriting the textbook of matter and how science understands how things behave that's the revolution in science that gave rise to these really cool things that we want to use the ability to have a vaccine that can end COVID the ability to send information around the world rapidly the ability to feed the world then the law says well wait a minute we regulate the atomic scale a lot there every country of the world has something about atomic energy atomic weapons every country no exceptions has law around that whether they have the weapons or not and whether they've learned to use the energy or not and of course in the bulk scale we regulate everything and there was this little empty space what the law calls a lecuna and in this lecuna people said well there must be no law obviously there's no law it's not atomic it's not bulk obviously nothing's governing that was wrong for two reasons first of all you have the fundamental laws of society human rights universality laws of trade laws of customs to get products in and out of countries those don't go away if you want to kill somebody you better have a really good reason for that in just about every country so those laws continue to exist vibrantly but also we have natural nanomaterials that have existed is at the nanoscale and we have seen throughout history how those nanomaterials behave so even as lawyers we had precedent even as lawyers we could look at things about nanomaterials we just didn't know them we didn't know the name of it now that big hole is being filled by lots of regulation as I said now reach is nanomaterials it has a separate protocol for carbon so nano has changed how we look at the law and then the circumstances of the world like covid have changed how the law behaves in the nano context alright we are having a lot of interesting conversations here at the show I have wonderful conversations it helps me grow my biggest problem really is that the scientists are resistant to the idea that laws is important they don't understand that after they do really good research if a court cites them if a product is advertised on television or used on the web that takes on a life of its own that is not related to what they were doing in their research when they thought they were creating it and the law is very very important in harnessing that you can have the greatest invention that's going to help people around the world and with nano we have seen this whether it's the concert that makes people feel better so they're not isolated during covid or it's the vaccine that enables some people to go out and not have covid or the food that we can give everybody whatever that nano enabled thing the telehealth of speaking on the communication system to your doctor without actually having to be there when everybody's in lockdown and there's not enough staff to help everybody who's sick all these wonderful nano enabled gifts at the same time they have to be used in a context where it's understood and it's healthy and the choices the societal choices pesticides is a great example nano pesticides will reduce the amount of pesticide we use it will save fields that are destroyed by too much toxic waste it will reduce risk of exposure to workers for distributing that pesticide on the crops but what does that mean it means it's a much more potent pesticide it's a much there we want the nano to kill things we want it to kill the bugs or bacteria that were after we want it to kill so we have to think very carefully about the tradeoffs that are involved yes it will bring us these wonderful wonderful benefits using less pesticide is a great idea so we're going to use a more potent pesticide and we have to think carefully about what that means if that pesticide is out of context if somebody says I can use this product I have a secondary use I have a tertiary market and is that what we want but those are societal choices that is not the science itself that is not the fault of the science that is about the information that is packaged with the science that goes to the consumer the general public the regulator the policy maker and the next generation of scientists cool so thanks a lot for this presentation for this conversation well I hope you like it I hope you will please join us at the European Scientific Institute in November maybe we'll even find a way to get some of it live streamed we'll be looking at nanotechnology feeding the world we're going to have five groups and they'll be working groups of students but they'll be across disciplines we're going to have lawyers of course finance people nanoscientists bioethicists medical people and I've persuaded at least one theologian to join us and we're going to have teams it's in the European Scientific Institute in Archon France which is just the suburbs of Geneva it's literally at the border I can walk to the Swiss border and get a bus to Geneva no problem the Geneva bus runs right there in November and we're going to each group is going to be assigned a specific task to really strategize what we're talking about TIO2, titanium dioxide in food at the nano scale how are we going to reconcile that in one place it's recognized as safe and the other one's to ban it those may have political components in those decisions but there's some science there somewhere and then the law has to do something about it because the mission of both of those agencies EPSA and FDA is to protect people and protect their food so that will be one group there will be a group looking at food security from the standpoint of theology and divine plan or whatever where does the ability to feed everybody fit into a theological context and then we'll have another group looking at packaging and whether any of this stuff actually migrates from the food into our bodies or our lakes and rivers and streams and we will have another group looking at food distribution where nano technology is a major player in preserving the food and keeping it fresh and available I mean there are companies that put expiration dates years ahead of when the food was harvested years well that's because of a bunch of nano-enabled stuff and we will have people looking at new foods and nano pesticides and just to mention also you sound like you're American right but you're also Greek I'm also Greek so it's nice to be here in the US and FDA to come together because I don't know what to eat anymore alright cool and you have my contact information I welcome everybody we'll put this under the video people can find information about your event in November make sure that you have my contact information ILF at georgetown.edu cool alright thanks a lot so I have to write the speech for tomorrow tomorrow's only about food you have presentations going on here yes tomorrow at noon is the food one and then I do two hours all the long concepts that I want the science to know you can show some of your old badges yes here you are in all the places I've wandered thanks to nanotechnology this several years back yes and people can just google you yes they can google me they can look for the global health law program at georgetown university and they can look for the work health and survival project which is in the USA and Europe and they can find me and that and there's this unshapered collection of videos of me talking at different conferences which maybe I'll have to hire you to help me how many? oh there are hundreds of conferences I've spoken you've spoken a lot well it's two things here of course we speak that's one of the things we do but when I was writing the thesis it was very important to go to conferences with scientists and speak and if they were angry about something I said how can you say the law should do this or whatever that really helped me clarify the issues that I think are important to write about and my husband's French he doesn't speak English so it forced me to speak in a simple language speak to non-native speakers in that sense very different most Americans speak in a bunch of idioms about baseball, football and you know how things work in America and I'm not caught up in that because I'm forever translating myself to non-English speakers and I think that makes for clearer writing I think that the most important thing about writing is to listen to other people before I write and my great sadness is that everybody is writing and not enough people are reading and if you want to write you really need to read and to listen to other people so if I had any message about writing because I have eight books and literally hundreds of articles it's that you really have to listen to other people to write well cool, alright thanks a lot see you later very, very fun alright in the chat I'll put you in a break for a second so please introduce yourself so my name is Kristina Buffer and I'm working at the Francine Institute of Applied Polymer Research which is located in Potsdam Goym close to Berlin in the southwest of Berlin and we are concerned with all many types of polymers from bio polymers up to electrical electrical conducting polymers and so I am personally in the division of functional polymers and devices and we are working on organic electronic device development and also deep material development at the front of IAP and for example behind you I see something to do with quantum dots organic light emitting diodes, OLEDs and what would you like to talk about first as I already mentioned in the introduction we are working on organic electronics in general and we have been busy in this field since 25 years starting this OLED research so we are working on development of OLED materials and OLED device stacks and this is a field that we are still working on about 12 years ago we started to work on quantum dot development so we are focusing on the development of platinum free quantum dots so called eco friendly platinum quantum dots and our focus is on materials based on indium phosphide for red and green emission and on zinc salinite for blue emission we have some examples here on the in the poster so you can see here devices that were made from red and green indium phosphide and the blue zinc salinite which was stopped with tellurium and the second focus that we have besides the material development is the development of processing technologies so one of the focus is setting up instrumentations and process technologies that are able to make processes for the manufacturing of organic electronic devices and this this is a combination of methods which are suitable to do large area processing such as slothide coating for lab scaches also spring coating or plate coating and we also are using digital processes and our focus is on inkjet printing and EHD jet printing the inkjet printing limits is limited with respect to the ink formulations to low viscosity inks and resolution I would say down to 20 to 40 micrometers EHD jet has the advantage to be able to print a resolution for instance here you see an example where we have a dot size of about 10 micrometer and also the same as here and the advantage of the EHD jet is that the viscosity range that is accessible is larger than the inkjet so we have a viscosity range that is carrying 4 orders of magnitude and so in this case here we have been printed fun to plot materials into a bench structure which were resolved in resin and these structures have a height of a micrometer and we can even make them thicker if we have the right bench structure to print these are examples that may be used later on as color filters for instance for micro LEDs so front hover is famous for developing inventing a whole bunch of crucial stuff that's just being used by billions of people every day and it could be in audio and displays and a lot of stuff is happening in the nano technology world that's true I may show just goes through some examples for instance here we have been active in a binational project with a company in France and a company in Germany for developing processes for ambient solution processing of OLEDs in order to address by inkjet printing customized applications that could be could be used for also small scale and cheap or low cost production of OLEDs another example is shown here where we did high resolution printing using the AEG jet this is an active matrix OLED and we printed one layer by AEG jet pixel defining layer of this type of active matrix backplane and then finished the display the display has been putting in this place and what you see is the local of this AU project and this system has 24000 single pixels that need to be printed and our goal is to make such a process scalable that it may be used to production later on this is all fascinating stuff and you when you develop this stuff you have prototypes but then you work in collaboration with all the companies that want to mass produce this that's true there's one example shown here this was a collaboration with different companies where pilot line has been developed in this project to do mass production of these types of barcodes and our goal in this project was to develop the printing processes by AEG jet in a way that it can be scalable and can be set into mass production so the requirement here was to achieve a print print process that allows printing of a substrate of 400 times 500 millimeters within 2 minutes and so do the whole processing and printing, drying steps with this type of repetition rate alright and we just at one poster you have another one the other poster shows the capabilities that we have in our institute so what you see here this is a view in our clean room facility of about 300 square meters and this clean room is equipped with all the equipment that you need for the processing of organic electronic devices so you see here a picture of our pilot line it's 50 meters long and we have the different deposition processes set into the pilot line we have the engine printing we have the PVE deposition we have the germination and we also have an atomic layer deposition for the encapsulation and we are carrying out different projects in the moment to use the AE for ASA encapsulation of organic electronic devices that we need barrier performance properties of 10 to the minus 6 gram per square meter in day and we are also working on the deposition of the global metals for instance for applications of membranes for selecting for instance for filtering for instance the equipment that we have in different places like inkjet printers printers that we are using this is the AE jet printer the equipment for the characterization like profilometry, bending test AFM 4 point probe and one of the center pictures what you see here is the need the requirements necessary to develop inks the combination of requirements that are needed in order to get at the end an optimized printing result and the instrumentation that we have together with the characterization enables us to do the ink development for customers who are interested in also upscaling production of this inkjet printing or other printing techniques so you have the cutting edge best printed electronics like research facility I think I mean it's always nice to have something more but we have facilities for doing all the processes that are necessary to produce this type of electronic devices and also the characterization facilities for those and for us these are the cutting edge facilities yes nice what kind of discussions do you have here at the nanotechnology conference people want to work with you and all kinds of stuff I have to think the moment before I talk into the camera to come to nanotechnology for us it's important to meet people from the same area as we are working on for instance we had a long cooperation with the nanotechnology lab here in Kessaloniki and there is a close exchange of information that's an important task we have but it's also important to meet project partners that we already have or maybe future project partners in the field of printing but also in the field of material development all right and to get to the next exciting projects yes we are looking forward to that thanks a lot I'm not a good photographer I'll put people on the break for a second so please introduce yourself welcome to cat market company here my name is John Valdas I'm the founder co-founder and CEO of cat market German company that has the ambition to create a technology marketplace digital technology marketplace so what we do is we have a digital platform where you practically as a research institute can file and promote your technology your innovation service should I already speak no it's good I tried to get Mario this is like a loop presentation about the company ideally we start with the first screen with this screen we can start the official recording okay it's actually going exactly 11 minutes yeah so what do we see here in the presentation so in the presentation you actually see a little overview about the company the cat market company is aiming at to help smaller medium enterprises with their product development and the main issue that the smaller medium enterprises have is that they need to find access to research institutes that they need support in financing funding and for building the supply chain and with our services we can help them to be really fast starting their development up to 50% and we do this in a way that we introduce a digital platform I will show this in a minute a digital system where people can file their technology or course whereas we can find the right technology for their product where we also include technical and scientific information on these particular technology and find opportunities for funding and actually we combine these with the service which is a I would say rather traditional service we call it single entry point for research services so the company and SME can come to us but actually ask us to organize the whole development of their product from the idea to the final product like if you want to have this smart watch as a recyclable thing then you can come to cat market and we will organize for you with the research institutes in the background we will organize for you in the whole program that is a very very short introduction about the cat market company to the first step especially for research institutes is to actually submit the technology offer to the cat market marketplace you will find it here on hpttpscatmarket.com or that.eu sorry not .com.eu and here you will see a list of services that is already included actually promote through our marketplace and that can be directly accessed here an example from ONET from Fraunhofer in Germany and the clicker in this offer you actually have the opportunity to see some details of the technology and to actually request a quote and we help you to get this technology done and we do it in the future that's looking for the upcoming future that you will be able to do this in Greek language in French language or locally and we will make it really a European multilingual database yeah that's is your vision all technology? our vision is we start with nano technology so all nano technologies put it into our platform and the vision is to make this the largest technology marketplace in the world yes that's our vision for five years from now because nano technology is a wide potential segment the good thing about nano technology is you will find it actually in every application in almost every application from medicine to buildings to packaging to food you will find nano technology almost everywhere and so it is starting point onto the starting point based on the technical knowledge that we have as founders of the company so that's the starting point when we go for biotechnologies in future as well as soon as we have grown to a certain level to a certain size is it a vision to accelerate time to market or is it also a vision to enable new business for people who have technology they want to sell and both it's actually both yeah so the main reason why we do it is to help especially European SME to accelerate their time to market by 50% so that's really something that we can achieve to say we cut your time to market by half because of our project management of our knowledge about all technologies we know actually before you start the first experiments we know actually which technology could be or is majorly best for you and the second thing is of course if you have a new technology you can talk to us and we will promote it to the market and we'll bring the right customers for you how do you have all the customers coming there all the suppliers coming there and you match actually the platform is a matching tool for customers and technologies so the first step is that we if you bring in your technology you file it you submit it to the platform and then people are able to find it and in addition to that we will do active promotion with people actually going there and going to conferences talking to customers understanding the customers needs and making the best fit between the customer and the right technology nice so you have a lot of discussions here at the nanotech technology conference yeah actually I had some very very interesting discussions here with new companies we got up on biomaterials also with machine makers and of course with the local companies here with OET and at the university where we really see potential for the marketing for the transfer of the technology to products and to the marketing can you say something about the business model or the price or how does it work actually if a customer comes and buys a technology service from us we will keep a certain surcharge for our services and our project management from the project that we create and that we build the platform the majority of the functionality of the platform is free to use so you can go there and submit the technology and don't need to pay anything however if you want to go for the knowledge base if you want to go for deep technical detailed scientific information and also some AI based tools to get the right information it will be a monthly subscription and since when have you been doing this platform and how big is the company and how big is it going to be actually we just started so it's not impressive to say that we started with seven shareholders and three operational people working on the business so that's not impressive yet but as we have just started we want to be the largest technology in a few years so I expect the rapid growth end of this year will be 4 to 5 people next year I expect 10 to 20 people and all Chinese suppliers can join? actually Chinese suppliers can join but we have some political mission as well that the majority of the value creation of the value proposition should be in Europe so that is our ambition to actually support the political objective of the European Commission to re-industrialize Europe and to bring production back here so that's why it's great to be right here in Tessaloniki is the coolest conference right now in Europe for nanotechnology for sure right now it is, actually it is also something else it is the first conference for nanotechnology that is held in person after the corona crisis so let's see how it develops and we'll definitely come back next year as well thanks a lot I'll put you in a break for a second it's kind of like the launch break time so it's a little bit hard for me to find the next interview right now so I'm going to do like yesterday I'm going to do a launch break I'm going to stop the video and start again in like an hour and a half for the afternoon Wednesday afternoon live stream back in an hour and a half for the live stream thanks for watching