http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/story/0C0BB64437235712862570F60066FDA7?OpenDocument
Down on the biopharm, Missouri plows ahead
By Rachel Melcer
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Saturday, Jan. 14 2006
Attracting and growing biopharm companies - those that
genetically engineer
crops to produce drugs or polymers - is just one play in
Missouri's bid to
build a biotech industry.
But it is an important one, because it trumps the concerns of
outstate voters
and legislators who now see the state's spending on biotech as a
benefit only
to St. Louis and Kansas City. The burgeoning biopharm business is
a potential
boon to farm income and rural economies.
So, Missouri is offering financial incentives to a pair of
biopharm firms, with
mixed results.
Chlorogen Inc., a startup company based at the Nidus Center for
Scientific
Enterprise in Creve Coeur, has decided to contract with farmers
and build a
processing plant in Cape Girardeau in about a year, said Chief
Executive David
Duncan.
The company was wooed by Kentucky, Florida and South Carolina,
but Missouri
offered the best financial package, he said.
Ventria Bioscience, a Sacramento, Calif.-based company, had
planned to relocate
to Maryville, Mo., but the deal fell through when federal and
state grants
failed to materialize. Missouri officials say they still are
talking with
Ventria in hopes of bringing the company to the state, but the
discussion has
gone back to the drawing board.
"We've also got feelers out to a number of other companies," said
Mike Mills,
deputy director of the Missouri Department of Economic
Development. "We do
focus very heavily on the biotech industry, and (biopharming)
just happens to
be a subset that provides an opportunity for rural Missouri to
benefit greatly."
Even if these efforts succeed, a jackpot is not assured.
Scientists agree that
biopharming technology can work, but it is controversial.
There are concerns that plants engineered to grow non-food
proteins might
cross-pollinate with unmodified neighbors and contaminate food
and animal feed
supplies. Industry proponents say scientific and physical
precautions can be
taken to prevent this - growing the proteins in non-food crops,
such as the
tobacco produced by Chlorogen, or raising modified food plants in
areas distant
from crops that will be eaten, as Ventria proposed to do by
growing rice in
northwestern Missouri instead of the state's Bootheel.
Chlorogen also is using chloroplast cells of tobacco leaves to
express the
pharmaceutical proteins, and these cells do not play a part in
reproduction.
But regulatory agencies are playing catch-up with the science,
which is
developing at a rapid pace. Strict rules need to be developed to
manage
biopharm crops, and it is unknown how these will affect the
industry, said
Roger Beachy, president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science
Center in Creve
Coeur and chair of Gov. Matt Blunt's Advisory Council for Plant
Biotechnology.
"There is a lot of hard science and good regulations to be
developed as (this)
industry develops," Beachy said. But he believes it can succeed.
Proponents also say biopharming can be lucrative, though the size
of the payoff
and its beneficiaries are in question.
A recent report by agriculture economist Robert Wisner of Iowa State
University, commissioned by the nonprofit Union of Concerned
Scientists, said
most of the benefit of biopharm crops would flow to big
pharmaceutical
companies rather than to farmers.
Most industry observers agree that the small biotech startups
developing this
technology will need to partner with these large corporations in
order to fund
the years of clinical trials and big marketing efforts needed to
sell any
therapeutic drug.
Chlorogen needs to secure such a deal before building operations
in Cape
Girardeau, Duncan said.
But growers and rural towns can benefit if production facilities
are built near
farm fields, as Chlorogen and Ventria have planned. Missouri has
engineering
and processing talent that can be employed in biopharming, said
Perry Wong,
senior economist with the Milken Institute, a think tank in Santa
Monica, Calif.
"It's a region (where) agriculture meets industry," he said.
"It's only
natural, and with very good synergy, that the area try to bring
in some new
technology ... to maximize the benefit to the state in job
creation and
building."
The technology offers a way to turn commodity farming into a
high-value niche
production system, said Jason Garst, a farmer in Watson, Mo., who
has
contracted with Ventria to produce its biopharm rice. "It's
simply the next
level of technology that's going to allow us growers to remain
profitable."
The key to keep in mind is that it's a niche industry, said
Judith Kjelstrom, a
microbiologist and director of the biotechnology program at the
University of
California, Davis.
"Some of the (political) leadership in the Midwest got caught up
in, 'Wow, this
is high-value farming.' And it is. But it's not going to be the
acreage that
you're used to seeing with soybeans and corn," Kjelstrom said,
comparing its
market potential to that of organic farming.
Beachy said the state's goal is to pursue a variety of high-tech,
value-added
agricultural biotech specialties, not just biopharming.
For example, Creve Coeur-based Monsanto Co., the world's leading
producer of
genetically modified crops, is developing soybeans and corn for
food use that
have added nutritional or processing benefits. Researchers at the
Donald
Danforth Plant Science Center are engaged in similar work.
Beachy agreed with Kjelstrom that biopharming alone is not likely
to be a huge
industry - unless it is embraced by the pharmaceutical giants.
But he said he
is confident that Missouri would be a good home for it.
The state also could gain from biopharming by boosting its
overall image as a
high-tech hot spot, Kjelstrom said.
"Any state that gets into promoting this technology, it's going
to be
successful," she said. "If you can say biopharming is alive and
well in
Missouri, you'll be seen as really visionary people."
rmelcer@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8394
********************************************************
To unsubscribe from SANET-MG:
1- Visit http://lists.sare.org/archives/sanet-mg.html to unsubscribe or;
2- Send a message to <listserv@sare.org> from the address subscribed
to the list. Type "unsubscribe sanet-mg" in the body of the message.
Visit the SANET-MG archives at:
http://lists.sare.org/archives/sanet-mg.html.
Questions? Visit http://www.sare.org/about/sanetFAQ.htm.
For more information on grants and other resources available through
the SARE program, please visit http://www.sare.org.