From water treatment to analytical chemistry
NECi Superior Enzymes has an origin story rooted in a simple idea: what if an enzyme could clean up our drinking water?
When Dr. W.H. (Bill) Campbell and Ellen R. Campbell founded The Nitrate Elimination Company, Inc. in 1993, they were chasing exactly that vision — a biological, "battery-powered" way to remove nitrate from drinking water. The key player was nitrate reductase (NaR), an enzyme at the heart of Bill's academic research on plant metabolism. The work earned publication in Nature and drew immediate interest from the scientific community. It also revealed something the Campbells hadn't fully anticipated: a ready market for nitrate reductase itself.
A practical water treatment system, it turned out, was still years away — but a better opportunity was hiding in plain sight.
Nitrate reductase could replace the toxic cadmium and heavy metals traditionally used to detect nitrate in water and other samples. Safer, more accurate, and gentler on the environment, enzymes turned out to be a natural fit for analytical chemistry. The Campbells followed that thread.
Enzymes are safer for the user, accurate in complex mixtures, and environmentally benign.
That instinct — that enzymes can do difficult things more safely, more accurately, and more cleanly than the alternatives — is what transformed a small university lab project into a leader in enzyme-based analytical chemistry. Here's how it happened.
The Full History
Every product we make today traces back to a post-doc, a pharmacology intern, and a bushel of corn seedlings.
The Campbells
In the mid-1970s, Dr. Bill Campbell was completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Michigan State University, where he first turned his attention to nitrate reductase — studying the enzyme in soybean seedlings. By 1979, he had joined the faculty at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry as an assistant professor of Chemistry, focusing on the biochemistry of nitrogen metabolism in plants.
Ellen Campbell arrived at SUNY around the same time, drawn to pharmacology research through an unlikely path: an early interest in herbal medicine had kindled a deeper curiosity about chemistry, which led her to an internship in the pharmacology department of SUNY's medical school. That's where she and Bill met. They married in 1981 and spent six months shortly after on sabbatical in Germany.
When Bill accepted a position in the Department of Biological Sciences at Michigan Technological University a few years later, the two of them built a research program together from the ground up. Ellen took on the role of lab manager, and the pair established facilities for monoclonal antibody and molecular biology research — learning as they went, and doing it well. Bill's publication record speaks for itself.
Enzymes from Corn Seedlings
The opportunity that would eventually become NECi arrived from an unexpected direction. In the late 1980s, a small German company called MoBiTech reached out to the Campbells — they were developing an immobilized enzyme system for removing nitrate from drinking water and needed nitrate reductase purified from corn seedlings. It was a modest request, but the Campbells saw a practical use for it: a small production operation could fund work-study students in their MTU lab while also supporting their own structure-function research on the enzyme.
They built a bench-scale purification system using monoclonal antibodies, and the collaboration bore fruit. In 1991, while the Campbells were on sabbatical in Stockholm, Bill and MoBiTech published a paper on the nitrate removal system in Nature. The following year, The New York Times covered the research in its Science Watch section (subscription required), and the letters and phone calls started pouring in — from wastewater treatment plant managers, residential community operators, and homeowners worried about their well water. The Campbells were taken aback. They hadn't fully grasped how widespread nitrate contamination was, or how urgently people were looking for a solution.
From Corn Seedlings to a Growing Company
NECi incorporated as a Michigan Subchapter S in May 1993 — officially The Nitrate Elimination Company, Inc. — with the goal of eventually bringing an enzyme-based nitrate removal system to the drinking water market. Sigma Chemical Company, a major laboratory reagent reseller, became NECi's first customer. Rather than bootstrapping, the Campbells leaned on grant funding to keep the business moving forward.
Grants proved to be the right engine for early growth. In 1995, the U.S. EPA awarded NECi its first SBIR grant to develop the nitrate removal system. That same year, two new customers came on board, purchasing nitrate reductase for their own nitric oxide research products. In 1996, a USDA Phase I and Phase II SBIR grant funded development of easy-to-use nitrate test kits for households and farms — products NECi still offers today. Salaries from the SBIR awards went straight back into the business.
New partnerships followed. YSI, Inc., a manufacturer of environmental and industrial monitoring instruments, contracted NECi to produce enzymes for their biosensor products. A methods development chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey began adapting nitrate reductase to automated laboratory analyzers — work that would eventually contribute to a published USGS standard method for enzymatic nitrate detection, replacing the toxic cadmium-based approaches that had been the industry norm.
By the end of the 1990s, NECi had outgrown its original facilities. They purchased Lake Linden's old post office — built in 1932 — for a deal, and settled into a home that felt like their own. In 2001, a Phase I grant from the DOE supported development of a nitrate biosensor, and NECi secured a working capital loan from the local economic development organization to keep momentum going.
Recombinant Protein Expression
By the late 1990s, demand for nitrate reductase had outpaced what corn seedlings could supply. Purification from plants was painstaking work, and there was simply no way to scale it. The solution was recombinant protein expression — and fortunately, Bill's academic lab at MTU had already been developing expertise in exactly that area.
The challenge was that nitrate reductase is an unusually complex protein to produce. Its size and structure — and its need for three separate cofactors to function — put it out of reach for E. coli, the standard workhorse for recombinant protein production at the time. Instead, NECi turned to Pichia pastoris, a yeast-based expression system better suited to complex proteins. With NIH SBIR funding behind them, NECi set out to do something that hadn't been done before: express a protein of this complexity in any recombinant system. NIH recognized the pioneering nature of the work and funded it gladly.
It paid off. By 2002, NECi had brought the first recombinant nitrate reductase to market. A second, more optimized form followed a couple of years later. With a new product line that had moved well beyond corn seedlings and water treatment, the company also introduced a new logo and began marketing under the name NECi — a practical clarification that honored the company's roots without suggesting they were still in the business of removing nitrate from drinking water. Testing, not treatment, was the story now.
Expansion
2003 marked a quiet but meaningful milestone: for the first time, NECi was turning a small profit rather than requiring personal investment to keep growing. A wing was added to the Lake Linden post office building to expand product assembly and shipping — a tangible sign that the business had found its footing.
Grant funding continued to open new doors. In 2010, the USDA supported further development of AtNaR-based field kits for agricultural nitrate testing — kits NECi still offers today. In 2013, a USDA Phase I grant funded development of an enzyme-based detection method for glycerol and related analytes. That work led to NECi's recombinant Galactose Oxidase, a single enzyme platform capable of accurately measuring glycerol, lactose, galactose, and fructose — analytes that matter across biofuels, food manufacturing, clinical diagnostics, and industrial processing. In 2014, a National Science Foundation grant supported development of a handheld photometer for field testing of phosphate and nitrate in soil samples — a product NECi brought to market and is currently redeveloping into an improved version.
By 2015, the company's original name had become a piece of history rather than a description. The Nitrate Elimination Company, Inc. rebranded as NECi Superior Enzymes — a name that better reflected two decades of work designing and producing recombinant enzymes for analytical chemistry.
Looking Forward
NECi's story has always followed a simple pattern: find a problem enzymes can solve, and do the science to solve it. The latest chapter is no different.
In 2023, the National Science Foundation awarded NECi a Phase I grant to explore a new frontier — an enzyme-based oxygen reduction system. Where nitrate reductase replaced toxic cadmium in water testing, this work asks whether enzymes can replace conventional oxygen scavenging methods. In 2026, NSF Phase II funding moved the project from research toward market. The applications are practical and wide-ranging: removing oxygen from food and beverage packaging extends shelf life and preserves quality — think wine, craft beer, and other products where even trace oxygen can compromise flavor, freshness, and safety.
None of this happens without the right people. Behind every grant, product, and published method is NECi's team of scientists who bring the same curiosity and rigor to their work that Bill and Ellen brought to that first corn seedling lab thirty years ago.
The Nitrate Elimination Company has come a long way from corn seedlings. But the instinct that started it all — that enzymes can do difficult things more safely, more accurately, and more cleanly than the alternatives — is exactly what's driving what comes next.