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ProdiGene's mistake affects emerging biopharm industry
(Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2003 -- CropChoice news) -- Bill Hord, Omaha World-Herald, via Agnet: LINCOLN, Neb.--Companies in an industry dubbed "biopharming" are, according
to this story, chasing a dream that someday crops will replace
multimillion-dollar buildings as the factories where many drugs are made,
but last fall, errors by a biotech company in College Station, Texas, called
ProdiGene Inc., led to the destruction of crops in Nebraska and Iowa and
called into question the concept of growing drugs in food crops. The
mistakes, which resulted in fines for ProdiGene, seemed to give validity to
years of warnings from environmental groups and more recent concerns from
big food companies.
Today, the biopharming industry is, the story explains, relatively small. At
least 16 companies are known to be testing drugs in plants. Only four of
those are publicly traded companies -- Dow Chemical Co., Large Scale Biology
Corp., Monsanto Protein Technologies Inc. and Syngenta.
The story goes on to say that after paying the USDA fine for violating
government growing restrictions and nearly $3 million to clean up crop
contamination, ProdiGene continues to do business in a world now more
suspicious of its open-field experiments.
ProdiGene President Tony Laos was quoted as saying, "It (the contamination)
never should have happened. Hopefully, people can look beyond the mistakes
that were made. We have those corrected."
Laos was further cited as saying ProdiGene is financially stable but
declined to discuss the sources of funding or reveal who owns the company,
except to say he is a small stockholder, adding "We have lived off of
venture capital and angel (private individual) financing."
The story says that companies around the world involved in the research have
had to defend their practices.
They were grateful that ProdiGene's wayward tests did not get into food.
Dow Chemical Co. announced it will seek isolated locations outside of the
Corn Belt for testing pharmaceutical corn, hopefully avoiding
cross-pollination and contamination. Different agencies of the U.S.
government -- the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the
Environmental Protection Agency -- are reviewing their guidelines for
open-field testing of pharmaceutical crops. The ProdiGene contamination
brought renewed focus to the governmental review that was already under way.
Greg Jaffe of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was quoted as
saying, "Our view is that the regulatory system needs to be greatly improved
to safeguard health and the environment." | |
