Unidym, a majority-owned subsidiary of Arrowhead Research Corporation (NASDAQ: ARWR), uses nanotechnology to produce high-performance, cost-effective products for the electronics industry. The Company possesses patented technologies and industry-leading capabilities in the synthesis and application of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), a nanostructured form of the highly abundant element.

Discovered in the early 1990’s and later pioneered by Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, CNTs have a unique structure that gives them extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties, including a current-carrying capacity per unit area that is one thousand times greater than copper and a tensile strength that is fifty times greater than steel. Such properties make CNTs highly promising materials for a number of current and future applications.

Unidym’s initial product is a transparent, conductive film of CNTs that replaces the approximately $1B of expensive and brittle metal oxide (e.g., ITO) films currently employed in touch screens, flat panel displays, OLEDs and thin film solar cells. The Company is already working with several potential customers in this space. Unidym is also developing CNT-based thin film transistors for the emerging flexible display market, that leverage the work of the Company’s founders, Professor George Gruner of UCLA. Unidym believes that its CNT-based devices will offer higher performance levels than are possible with strictly polymer-based approaches.

Unidym’s product line builds upon the growing trend in the electronics industry to replace today’s expensive materials and manufacturing processes with simpler, lower-cost production techniques similar to those found in the printing industry. Termed flexible or printable electronics, this opportunity been forecast by independent experts from IDTechEx to be $30 billion by 2015, and as much as $250 billion by 2025.

Through its recent merger with Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. (CNI), Unidym has created one of the most expansive intellectual property portfolios in the CNT industry, with foundational patents covering nearly every aspect of CNTs. Although Unidym is currently focused on the CNT electronics industry, its patent portfolio broadly covers many other promising CNT applications, ranging from structural composites to sensors to therapeutics. The Company collaborates with and licenses its intellectual property to manufacturers of products in these other CNT industries.