Cleaning Up

Houston-based solugen is making cheaper, more effective industrial chemicals to help scrub everything from pools and hot tubs to oil and gas companies’ wastewater

- ALEX KNAPP

A long-standing poker game with a group of University of Texas Southwestern medical students in Dallas brought Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt together. Wenly Ruan, Chakrabarti’s dissection lab partner and Hunt’s then-girlfriend (now wife), was the link. But soon Chakrabarti, an MD/PhD (or “Mud-Phud,” in medical school parlance) candidate researching a drug candidate for pancreatic cancer, and Hunt, a graduate student in chemical engineering at MIT, were geeking out over science.

“Sean was terrible at poker,” says Chakrabarti, now 31. Though Hunt kept losing, he continued to play for years, as he returned to Dallas from Boston to visit Ruan. And as they played, Chakrabarti and Hunt continued their geekout. Chakrabarti was researching enzymes found in cancer cells that produce hydrogen peroxide, and he wondered if that process might apply to Hunt’s research on improving traditional chemical manufacturing. Hunt scoffed at the idea. “I was, like, ‘There’s no way an enzyme could be used in an industrial, long-scale chemical process’,” recalls Hunt, also 31. “But as we kept talking and diving into it, Gaurab convinced me.”