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Re: [SANET-MG] Down on the biopharm, Missouri plows ahead



Hi Evon,
The article is certainly scary in its one sided public relations approach.
"If you can say biopharming is alive and well in Missouri, you'll be seen as really visionary people." In reality as the conventional food crops grow polluted with genes for pharmaceuticals and thus unsafe for food and feed you will be seen as a dangerous lunatic only fit for constraint in an institution. sincerely,joe
sydney151 wrote:

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

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