QUOTE OF THE WEEK?
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"We remain absolutely committed to the bio-pharming opportunity," Celentis' marketing manager Adam Barker said. "Our partner in the bio-pharming business, PPL, has unfortunately gone under.
"How we intend to continue to exploit those opportunities is a matter of how we continue to build the business."
"It is still, from Agresearch's perspective, a very, very attractive business to be in. . .but we're not prepared to disclose what we're actually doing regarding PPL, regarding the PPL assets, and regarding our other activities to try and continue the business."
[ie DESPITE THE HYPE, WE HAVEN'T A CLUE!]
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Biotech collapse may cost NZ $2b in GE business
20 September 2003
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2664516a13,00.html
A subsidiary of the Government's biggest science company, Agresearch, yesterday declined to say how it will repair a biotech joint venture after the collapse of its partner.
The failure has cast doubt on New Zealand's ability to cash in on a quick and relatively straightforward genetic engineering project - production of a human enzyme in cow's milk to aid in the digestion of fats - projected to have a global market of nearly $2 billion a year.
Celentis, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Agresearch, had been counting on international biotech company PPL Therapeutics in a venture to create complex proteins from genetically engineered cattle to treat human diseases.
But PPL has failed and is selling off its assets around the world, including a Waikato farm with New Zealand's largest flock of GE sheep.
"We remain absolutely committed to the bio-pharming opportunity," Celentis' marketing manager Adam Barker said. "Our partner in the bio-pharming business, PPL, has unfortunately gone under.
"How we intend to continue to exploit those opportunities is a matter of how we continue to build the business."
"It is still, from Agresearch's perspective, a very, very attractive business to be in. . .but we're not prepared to disclose what we're actually doing regarding PPL, regarding the PPL assets, and regarding our other activities to try and continue the business."
Celentis was trying to put new partnerships in place and the negotiations were "commercially sensitive".
The joint venture was working on producing in cow's milk a human enzyme, bile salt stimulated lipase (BSSL), which helps people digest fats carrying important fatty acids.
In healthy adults, it is produced in the pancreas but PPL had calculated a global market of nearly $2 billion for BSSL as a nutritional supplement to help premature or bottle-fed babies.
Asked whether Celentis was considering taking over the PPL's intellectual property in the BSSL project, Mr Barker said: "I'm not able to tell you that".
The BSSL work is complicated by the fact that multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca originally owned, and retains rights to buy back into it if clinical trials are successful.
In the original joint venture, Celentis announced in December 2000, that the venture with PPL "is expected to generate substantial future revenue and profits", partly because PPL's intellectual property and business strengths offered exciting opportunities.
The venture was developing cattle producing a protein for medical experiments to see if it could be used to treat multiple sclerosis, other cattle producing human serum albumin (HSA), used in the treatment of burns and other traumatic injuries.
The third project was planned to be either the large scale production of BSSL, or another nutritional product, depending on which could first be approved by the Environmental Risk Management Authority.
Agresearch had planned to sub-contract the purification of therapeutic proteins to PPL, and Celentis was providing the cattle for the first three projects.
The 50:50 joint venture would also have had access to PPL's exclusive rights cloning patents for milk proteins developed by its associated Roslin Institute in Scotland.
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