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Industrial Associates Program
The goal for this section is to provide information about microbial biofilms and their relevance to Industrial applications.
To address this goal it is very important to consider ongoing industrial interest in the role of biofilms across a wide spectrum of applications. The Center for Biofilm Engineering has a very active Industrial Associates program in which companies and agencies interested in biofilms join the program, pay an annual subscription fee, and attend technical conferences semi-annually. Below is the 2008 membership (32 members) which includes companies and agencies in HealthCare, Biomedical, Pharmaceuticals, Specialty Chemical, Petroleum, Water, and others.
Household Products |
Testing Laboratories |
Specialty Chemicals |
| Church & Dwight Colgate-Palmolive Kimberly-Clark Masco Procter & Gamble Reckitt Benckiser Unilever Whirlpool |
Bridge Preclinical Testing Embro |
Ciba Specialty Chemicals The Dow Chemical Co. Ecolab Novozymes A/S Rohm & Haas |
National Laboratories |
Health Care/Biomedical |
|
| NASA Sandia National Laboratories |
3M Bausch & Lomb Cardinal Health (enturia) ConvaTec Covidien (Tyco) Cubist Ethox International Glanbia Nutritionals GlaxoSmithKline Mölnlycke Health Care NovaBay Pharmaceuticals QuoNova LLC Stryker Orthobiologics Targanta Therapeutics W.L. Gore |
This Figure shows the total Industrial Associate membership (73 member) during the period of 1986-2008 by category of interest (the horizontal lines define the duration of membership for individual companies for each industrial sector). During this 22-year period the CBE has collaborated with these diverse companies and agencies on a wide variety of biofilm-related issues. These collaborations have generated a data base of industrially-relevant biofilm research and testing results which has been recorded in numerous project reports, theses, and journal publications. Review and synthesis of this long-term collaboration provide very interesting insight into the collective interests of a large, diverse group of companies and agencies concerning problems and opportunities associated with biofilms. This topic will now be addressed by looking at some examples of industrial systems with biofilm problems, summarizing the research questions which the Industrial Associate members have asked (and continue to ask), and then look for common themes in among these lists of research questions.
