By managingeditor@localnewsllc.com | on December 26, 2018

Chesterfield-based Grenova specializes in building machines that clean and sterilize the pipette tips used in laboratories. ASH DANIEL

After years studying engineering and biomedical engineering in the Tar Heel state – earning a bachelor’s from the University of North Carolina and a master’s from Duke – Ali Safavi finally found his purpose. It was in the trash.

While working as an engineer in a robotics laboratory in the late 2000s, Safavi was struck by all the plastic waste. Namely, the small plastic “pipette” tips that labs use to precisely disperse and transfer small amounts of liquid. The tips attach to slender measuring tubes, or pipettes, and are discarded after a single use to prevent cross contamination.

In other words, pipette tips are the plastic straws of the scientific research industry.

After some initial research, Safavi discovered that industrial laboratories can cycle through tens of thousands of the tips daily, and they all end up in the trash. Not only does that amount to a lot of discarded plastic; it’s also throwing away money. So, he put his engineering skills to work to find a solution. He created a method for cleaning pipette tips to extend their lifespan through multiple uses.

Grenova CEO Ali Safavi at the company’s headquarters in Chesterfield. ASH DANIEL

“There are a lot of plastic consumables that are being used in the lab and are being discarded after one-time use,” says Safavi, 36. “I realized that there was a need in the market.” Today, his epiphany is saving companies millions of dollars every year. Safavi is founder and chief executive of Chesterfield-based Grenova LLC, a company that builds machines to clean and sterilize high-quality laboratory plastic that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

An engineer at heart with a love of designing and building, Safavi hadn’t thought of launching his own business until he began pursuing his master’s in engineering management at Duke and took some business courses.

Curious to test some of the business practices he was learning in school, he co-created Chirba Chirba, a Chinese dumpling food truck in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Safavi is no longer involved with Chirba Chirba, but starting his first company taught him how to find a niche and launch a new product, and educated him on the importance of marketing and branding.

After completing the first full prototype of his TipNovus machine in 2014, Safavi founded his company and received his initial seed money from the now-defunct Health Diagnostic Laboratory that same year. HDL brought him to Richmond; in 2015 he moved his company from Richmond to a commercial building on Southlake Boulevard, just south of Chesterfield Towne Center. Grenova now has its devices in labs across the country, and recently began launching its products in Europe and Asia.

Looking a little like a 2- by 2-foot white filing cabinet, Grenova’s TipNovus devices are designed to sit on laboratory benches or countertops. The automated systems consist of two units, a washer and a dryer. Grenova currently offers three TipNovus devices: the standard TipNovus, the smaller TipNovus Mini and the TipLumis, an accessory that helps labs store the washed and cleaned tips.

The standard TipNovus device can precision clean 384 pipette tips within 10 minutes using a combination of cleaning reagents, pressure washing, ultrasonic cleaning and UV sterilization. Depending on the quality of plastic used for the pipette tips, labs can comfortably reuse the same tips 10 times or more; some have even used the device for 25 cleanings.

While the device is growing in popularity, Safavi says he can’t disclose customers for his “very cost-effective, green solution that everyone wants to keep secret,” noting that companies often want to keep their cost-savings methods to themselves as a competitive advantage.

“We have a hard time getting references,” he says.

Safavi also won’t publicly disclose the number of labs that use TipNovus – or the cost of his machines – but says that as of the second quarter of this year, more than 62 million individual pipette tips had been washed and reused because of his company, saving more than $4.3 million for laboratories across the industry.

And Grenova is growing. The company recently raised more than half a million dollars to expand their manufacturing presence three- or four-fold in the next year. Grenova is also looking to grow its seven-person team by two or three employees. So far, Grenova has been issued six patents in America, two international patents and has more pending.

An early proponent of Safavi’s technology is Joseph McConnell, a company board member. As the former president, CEO and co-founder of HDL, McConnell was sold enough on the device to spend the initial seed money to fund early testing for the prototype. The move led to significant cost savings for HDL, which was spending more than $1 million annually on pipette tips at the time. By simply reusing pipette tips after a single wash, the company saved $500,000 over the course of a year, according to McConnell.

“We rigorously tested it on thousands and thousands of specimens to make sure we’d get the same result,” McConnell says, explaining that they wanted to be sure the tips held up after washing. “We found that you could wash these things 20 times and still get the same results.”

When HDL dissolved in 2015 amid lawsuits alleging it paid kickbacks to doctors, Grenova was just getting started. Safavi has continued to grow the company, and today, one of the largest hospital labs in the world is among its clients.

“We’re really sitting on something here that’s very exciting,” McConnell says.

The issue of single-use plastics in life sciences laboratories is a real problem, according to Allison Paradise, executive director of the California nonprofit My Green Lab. A former neuroscientist, Paradise says she formed her nonprofit after becoming frustrated by the amount of plastic waste she saw generated in laboratories.

Citing a 2016 scientific journal article, Paradise says labs generate an estimated 12 billion pounds of plastic annually. As a comparison, Paradise equates that to an island “23 times the size of Manhattan ankle-deep in plastic.”

Most plastic isn’t biodegradable and only 9 percent of plastic is recycled, so much of it breaks down slowly in landfills or in the ocean, releasing toxic chemicals and harming wildlife and humans. My Green Lab encourages laboratory workers to approach their use of consumables in the lab the way they would at home: reduce, reuse, recycle. Among other environmentally conscious measures, Paradise recommends washing and eventually recycling pipette tips and repurposing the boxes they come in.

“It’s a great idea, because being able to wash and reuse [pipette tips] really cuts down on waste,” says Paradise of Grenova’s TipNovus technology.

Stradling interests both economic and ecological, Safavi believes he’s hit a home run with his devices.

“We are the only company that’s offering a solution such as this,” he says. ¦

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