Fall 2025
By Katharine Shilcutt

At Rice, the word “laboratory” barely captures the scale of James Tour’s empire of innovation. It’s more like an idea factory — one that is once again grabbing headlines for a potentially life-saving breakthrough: a new weapon against pancreatic cancer.

In early 2025, Tour’s lab unveiled a pioneering advance in cancer treatment. Using a method called molecular radiosensitization, they created formulations that dramatically enhance radiation’s ability to destroy pancreatic tumors — one of the most lethal and treatment-resistant cancers known. The tumors shrank significantly without harming healthy tissue. Tour called the results “astounding,” offering a glimmer of hope for a disease where five-year survival rates remain dismal.

Yet for Tour, who is among the world’s most cited chemists, this kind of breakthrough is just one entry on an extraordinary — and ever-growing — list.

“We try not to stay in one lane,” Tour said. “If we see a problem that can be solved with chemistry or materials science, we go after it.”

That philosophy has led his lab into an astonishing array of fields. Environmental technology, for example, has seen some of Tour’s boldest moves. His team developed a low-energy, scalable method for dismantling per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — the “forever chemicals” that threaten drinking water worldwide. Tour described it as “transformative,” a potential game changer for public health and the environment.

Tour’s approach is often about turning trash into treasure. In 2022, his lab revealed a method to treat plastic waste so it could capture carbon dioxide from the air — a major tool against climate change. That built on his earlier 2020 invention: flash graphene, a technique that converts waste such as food scraps, plastic and rubber into valuable graphene in milliseconds. Flash graphene could revolutionize industries from construction to electronics while sharply reducing carbon footprints.

Unlike many labs, however, Tour doesn’t just publish and move on. He actively pushes his discoveries toward commercialization: More than a dozen startups and partnerships have spun out from his research. These ventures tackle everything from sustainable materials to medical therapeutics, ensuring Tour’s ideas don’t just stay in journals — they hit the real world, fast.

“We want to create technologies that help people now, not 30 years from now,” he said.

That urgency is clear in how quickly Tour’s ideas move from concept to company.

Expanding the Frontiers of Nanotechnology

Tour’s latest nanotechnology breakthrough, announced in 2024, showcases “molecular jackhammers” — tiny, rapidly vibrating carbon structures that can bore into cell membranes and kill unwanted cancer cells or superbacteria with unprecedented precision. This nanotech opens a new modality of therapy against diseases while minimizing damage to healthy tissue. It’s exactly the kind of disruptive advance that has become a Tour hallmark: ambitious, imaginative and aimed squarely at real-world impact.

We want to create technologies that help people now, not 30 years from now.

“Jim combines a deep understanding of carbon chemistry with a focus on technology transfer, and this has been a winning formula for him,” said Thomas Killian, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and professor of physics and astronomy. “He truly embodies the mission of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences to advance fundamental understanding of the natural world and improve the human condition through pioneering research.”

It’s easy to be dazzled by the range of fields Tour touches: cancer therapy, chemical cleanup, sustainable manufacturing, advanced nanotechnologies like computer memories and ultrastrong materials. But what’s equally striking is the speed. Where many labs choose a narrow focus, Tour’s group sprints across disciplines with breathtaking agility.

The Engine Behind the Breakthroughs

The driving force is relentless culture of invention and a refusal to fear failure. Tour credits his team of graduate students, postdocs and collaborators for sharing his drive.

“You have to be willing to learn new areas quickly,” he said. “It’s about curiosity, and it’s about not being afraid to fail.”

That ethos has made the Tour Lab a magnet for ambitious young scientists and a powerhouse of research output.

Take, for example, the invention of a new method of creating graphene — a two-dimensional carbon lattice that can boost the performance and efficiency of solar cells, computer chips and myriad other electronics. Graphene is stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum and a fantastic conductor of both heat and electricity, but it’s also time-consuming to make and can require an expensive clean-room environment. In Tour’s lab, mechanical engineer Jian Lin — a postdoctoral researcher at the time — stumbled across a way to create laser-induced graphene that was far more practical and cost-effective.

One night in 2014, Lin was testing whether an infrared-light-emitting laser could transform graphene oxide into sheets of graphene. The laser missed, but instead of burning the target, it seared the polymer behind the material. Lin, taught to follow his instincts for curiosity, examined the results using a Raman Spectrometer and found bunched-up layers of graphene. This discovery suggested graphene could be created using any blank-slate material containing carbon — a realization that has since made creating high-quality graphene easier than ever before.

“Dr. Tour is very inspiring and gave me full freedom and confidence to explore the unknown,” said Lin, now an associate professor and the William R. Kimel Faculty Fellow in Engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “He is also very supportive and open-minded.”

Tour has published more than 800 scientific papers and holds more than 150 patents. He is also one of the most cited chemists globally — an acknowledgment not just of the volume but the influence of his work.

“His creation of the terminology of ‘laser-induced graphene’ was amazing and has been widely cited in the field since then,” Lin noted.

While many breakthroughs emerge in silos, Tour’s influence spans industries: health care, energy, manufacturing, environmental remediation. His flash graphene method could someday make cities greener and cheaper to build. His PFAS destruction process could help communities finally win battles against toxic groundwater. His cancer nanotechnologies could extend and improve lives.

“At Rice, we believe transformative science happens when researchers are empowered to take risks across disciplines,” said Christopher Johns-Krull, interim vice president for research and professor of physics and astronomy. “Jim exemplifies that spirit. His lab is proof that when you foster creativity, collaboration and bold thinking, the results can change the world.”

The Tour Lab represents a new model for 21st-century science: fast, entrepreneurial and deeply interdisciplinary research aimed at making the world a better place.

“We don’t set small goals,” Tour said. “We go after the problems that matter.”

With a portfolio already reshaping cancer treatment, environmental cleanup and nanomedicine — and with a commercialization pipeline that brings those ideas to market — Tour’s impact is hard to overstate, as he changes the world one audacious breakthrough at a time.

And if past is prologue, he’s only getting started.
 

Inside the Tour Lab: A Snapshot of Breakthroughs

A Decade of Discoveries to Dollars

Tour has started 17 companies in the past decade — three of which are public — with a cumulative value of more than $1.5 billion. They include: