A regular visitor: our trusted long-term chitosan producer Dr. Dominique Gillet discussed recent results and future plans with us.

Dr. Dominique Gillet, serial founder of France Chitine, Gillet Chitosan, Mahtani Chitosan, and Stellar Biosol, came to visit us in Münster for a day of intense discussions on the future of chitosans. He has been our trusted chitosan provider for almost 25 years, sharing his time half and half between France where he lives and India where he produces chitosans from shrimp shells. Over the decades, he developed one of the largest chitin and chitosan production facilities in the world, where he produces at industrial scale among the best chitosans in the world. We have accompanied this development with regular quality control checks of his products by analyzing the chitosans, always using the most advanced methodologies, lately most of the times developed by Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and his team of students. In parallel to these structural analyses, we performed a wide array of functional bioassays to quantify diverse bioactivities of the different chitosans, lately performed mostly by Dr. Carolin Richter and her team of students. And this is also what we discussed this time: the results we obtained using the last chitosans we had received from him, and the plans for analyses of the new chitosans he brought with him. We have a feeling that we are reaching a culmination point for our understanding of molecular structure-function relationships of second and third generation chitosans. What exciting times!