Web of intrigue

By sticking fine powders to a thin web, they can be handled and dosed out very precisely. The technique, developed for the pharmaceutical industry, is equally applicable to food or even possibly cosmetic industries, by making use of adhesives and/or webs that are edible. Other potential applications range from generating test strips for diagnostic work, to colour dosing for plastics, to dosing out herbs and spices for exotic domestic cookery. The ‘Sticky Web’ is the brainchild of 42 Technology (42T), based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. It aIl started when GlaxoSmithKline asked if the company could come up with a way of precisely metering out powders at high speed for tablet production. They wanted to be able to dose out 0.1mg to 100mg portions of drug at rates of several hundred per hour.