Industrial Concerns

As a beginning point it is important to first identify the type of industries which are currently interested in biofilm issues. A look at the individual industries currently associated with the Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE) provides a summary of contemporary industrial interest in biofilms (Figure).

The CBE 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. Figure 1 shows the 2009 membership (32 members) which includes companies and agencies in HealthCare, Biomedical, Pharmaceuticals, Specialty Chemical, Petroleum, Water, and others.

Figure 2 shows the total Industrial Associate membership (73 members) 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.