23rd August 2013
By Bryan T. Smyth
bryan@TheCork.ie
The Cork Person of the Month, for August 2013, has been named
Dr. Sinéad B. Doherty recently won the Bank of Ireland/IGNITE Business
of the Year 2013 and the Outstanding Young Person of the Year from
Junior Chamber International, Cork.
She has now received a Cork Person of the Month award, which means her
name also goes forward for possible selection as Cork Person of the
Year at an awards function at year’s end.
Sinéad Doherty was honoured to mark her ground-breaking work, through
her technology development company AnaBio, which produces microscopic
capsules to protect food ingredients, animal feeds and therapeutics.
She developed a technique using milk proteins and other biomaterials
to create capsules that protect and deliver sensitive ingredients to a
targeted site.
“Think of a smartie – we make the sugar coating that surrounds the
chocolate – and equally our protective capsule delivers, say, a
probiotic to a specific target site in the body with a targeted
release. We tailor-make such capsules for specific ingredients and
specific sites in the body”, explained Dr. Doherty.
Sinéad Doherty originally worked on this technology as part of her PhD
in Teagasc, Fermoy and UCC. In practice her company, launched just
over a year ago, takes relatively cheap biological materials from
milk, seaweed, citrus fruit, rice and peas and uses them to
manufacture the capsule structures.
Founder and CEO of AnaBio Technologies, Sinéad Doherty now has
laboratories in Dublin and Moorepark and has clients in South America,
Europe, as well as Ireland.
“We basically develop new technology to solve problems and license
these technologies to customers around the world. We are also moving
in new directions too, looking at vaccine delivery and investing in
human trials of the capsules in sports nutrition and food
supplements”, added Sinéad.
