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[SANET-MG] another pharm crop company faces set back



Columbia Daily Tribune
Ventria cancels move to Northwest Missouri

Published Saturday, December 31, 2005
KANSAS CITY (AP) - A California-based company specializing in plant-made pharmaceuticals announced yesterday that it won’t be coming to Northwest Missouri State University.

Ventria Bioscience had planned to remove proteins from genetically modified rice at a facility under construction at the university. The proteins could be refined for use in medicines to fight diarrhea, dehydration and other illnesses.

The company, based in Sacramento, Calif., was to anchor the Missouri Center of Excellence for Plant Biologics on the university’s campus in Maryville. The school planned the center with the hope that it would stimulate the rural economy and provide students with opportunities in biotechnology fields.

But the university’s president, Dean Hubbard, said demand for Ventria’s product had increased much faster than anticipated. Within the next two years, the company would need 10 times more capacity than could be provided at the protein extraction facility under construction, Hubbard said. The school and Ventria had planned to build a larger extraction facility in a second phase of construction, but money for that project couldn’t be raised quickly enough.

"We were struggling because they needed to do extraction much faster than we had originally expected, and we simply couldn’t meet those deadlines in terms of construction and funding," he said.

Hubbard said that Ventria’s withdrawal does not signal an end to the Center for Excellence.

"We developed a concept before we knew Ventria existed," he said. "That concept is as viable today as it was then. What we simply will do is go to one of the other companies we’ve had discussions with and find another anchor client that can fit into what we do."

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