Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995 TAG: 9505270006
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
She's tasting the fruits of biotechnology as she sips that bubbly brew, a fact that our hypothetical young career woman probably doesn't realize.
Biotechnology, explains Tracy Wilkins, director of Virginia Tech's biotechnology center, is simply "applied biology," using the science to make something to help mankind, even something as commonplace as beer.
Ancient Sumerians may have brewed beer, and the Egyptians used yeast as early as 6,000 years ago to make their bread rise.
Rather than representing an ancient art, biotechnology now stands in some cases on the frontiers of science; and researchers at Virginia Tech are among the pioneers.
Several companies whose goods or services are based on biotechnology have sprung up around Blacksburg and Roanoke, many of them as a direct result of the research under way at Virginia Tech. Those companies are involved in such varied things as the use of microbes to clean up oil and chemical spills and the genetic altering of tobacco plants and farm animals to produce new medicines.
In August, before the start of the fall semester, Tech will open a $9.5 million building near the southwest corner of the campus Drill Field to house the school's Fralin Center for Biotechnology, named for the late Roanoke real estate developer Horace Fralin. He was a Tech alumnus and member of the school's board of visitors.
The new building will make it possible to bring together for the first time teachers and researchers from Tech's colleges of arts and sciences, engineering, agriculture and veterinary medicine who work in the realm of biotechnology. Wilkins also hopes to have faculty from Tech's Pamplin College of Business working at the center.
\ The center's director, who comes from an agricultural background, believes in putting scientific discoveries to work for people. Wilkins started two biotech businesses, and he teaches a course on business and entrepreneurship for young scientists.
The center's advisory board is drawn from businesses from across the state. "Students will be exposed to a corporate environment more than is generally true in a [college] department," Wilkins said.
The building was designed by Cooper and Lecky, a Washington, D.C. architectural firm, in consultation with Tech professors, and is being built by Branch & Associates Inc. of Roanoke. With a three-story atrium and constructed on the outside of the same "Hokie" stone as are many other Tech buildings, it is a striking addition to the Tech campus.
Half the cost of the building is being paid for by the state through a bond referendum approved by the voters in 1992 and the remainder with money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, helped push through.
Modern biotechnology as "one of the most commercially important emerging industries in the United States," Boucher said in a recent interview. It's a uniquely American industry whose importance the Japanese have recognized by targeting it for development, he said.
Boucher thinks the industry will continue to grow in Southwest Virginia. "The primary reason is because of the outstanding quality of work at Virginia Tech," he said.
Nationwide, biotech companies number 1,200, according to the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington, D.C. Virginia economic development officials have identified 75 biotechnology companies in the state. They are located primarily in the Northern Virginia, Richmond and Blacksburg-Roanoke areas.
Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology has established a biotech research center in Richmond in conjunction with Virginia Commonwealth University. But Wilkins says that the Blacksburg-Roanoke area is as strong in biotech as the Richmond area.
The CIT's industrial database contains a dozen biotech businesses located around Blacksburg and Roanoke, and at least one other has been identified. Most of these companies are small, some are still in the research-and-development stage and some are waiting for government regulators to approve their products for market.
One of the oldest and largest biotech companies in the Roanoke Valley is Sybron Biochemical of Salem, which sells microbes and other biological products for keeping drains and septic tanks clean, for treating industrial and municipal waste water and for cleaning up chemical contamination of the soil and groundwater. The plant is a subsidiary of Sybron Chemical Industries of Birmingham, N.J., which bought it from a local owner in 1969.
The company has 55 full-time employees at facilities on Kessler Mill Road and another 12 to 20 part-time workers. The biochemical division accounted for more than 10 percent of the parent company's $141 million in sales last year, said Plant Manager Lois Davis. For the past eight years, sales at the Salem plant have been growing by between 12 and 50 percent a year, she said.
Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg houses several of the region's relatively new biotech companies. Among them are:
nTechLab, begun in 1989 in its founders' garages. It now occupies 60,000 square-feet in the research center and employs a dozen people. Wilkins is the company's president. David Lyerly, a former Tech faculty member, is vice president and oversees day-to-day operations.
The company designs and manufactures kits for diagnosing diarrheal diseases such colitis, dysentery and salmonella, which kill 5,000 to 10,000 people everyday around the world. The kits are based on research at Tech and the University of Virginia and the company has licensed patents from those schools. The company had gross sales of $1.25 million last year and has been growing 25 percent a year, Wilkins said.
PPL Therapeutics Inc. Wilkins and others formed a company, TransPharm Inc., in 1992 to commercialize technology developed at Virginia Tech for the production of human proteins in the milk of pigs, which have been "engineered" to carry the human genes for the proteins. In 1993, the company merged with PPL Therapeutics Ltd. of Scotland, which was producing genetically engineered human proteins in sheep's milk.
The company's research and development operations are in a new building at the Tech corporate research center, and it operates a 900-acre farm in the Blacksburg area.
PPL is collaborating with Bayer AG, the German chemical giant, in the production of AAT, a protein that could help prevent lung damage from diseases such as emphysema and cystic fibrosis. Collaborations on other products are under way with the Wyeth-Ayerst Division of American Home Products and with a Seattle subsidiary of Novo-Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company. Fibrinogen, the human protein, being developed with the Danish company, aids in blood clotting and can be used in tissue sealant during surgery when stitches or staples cannot be used.
CropTech Development Corp. Another company working on genetically engineered human proteins; only it's using tobacco plants as its human protein factories rather than farm animals.
CropTech is working on products for both the human and animal health markets, said David Radin, the company's president and a former Tech faculty member. The company was formed in 1992 by Radin and Carole Cramer, also a Tech scientist.
The company has supported itself with grants from the National Institutes of Health and some small investments by private individuals, Radin said.
Dominion Biosciences Inc. Formed in 1993, the company is working on marketing three products: Ecologix, an environmentally safe bait developed by a Tech researcher that stops reproductive growth in both adult and immature cockroaches; LEONE, a nontoxic, biologically based fungicide developed by a Penn State researcher for use on plants, fruits and vegetables; and Rapid Water-Test, a fast test for fecal contamination of water, also developed by a Tech scientist.
The company's chief executive officer, Steve Banegas, a resident of Greensboro, N.C., is not a scientist but a businessman who goes out looking for new technologies with market potential. Previously, he spent 18 years in marketing with the Ciba-Geigy Ltd., a Swiss chemical manufacturer.
Banegas said the university provides fertile ground for new business. Both the university faculty and administration are interested in putting research to commercial use, he said. "A lot of universities have a history of putting bumps in the road," he said.
Banegas has made use not just of Virginia Tech scientists but has hired other Tech employees for part-time work, too. A Tech art professor designed the company's logo and letterhead, another employee produced photographic slides and a Tech public relations employee turned out a company press release as a spare-time project.
Wilkins estimates that between 75 to 100 people are working in the Tech corporate center for small biotech companies, but said one good breakthrough could mean a 1,000-employee company for the region. By building a lot of small companies, the region is developing the infrastructure that could produce the larger companies, he said.
\ While biotech holds the promise of exciting new medicines, vegetables with longer shelf lives, disease-resistant crops and other products, the emerging science has raised both ethical and scientific concerns among some critics.
This month, religious leaders from 80 organizations joined in a campaign organized by biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin against the awarding of government patents for genetic engineering. The first such patent was awarded in 1980 following a Supreme Court case.
"We see altering life forms, creating new life forms, as a revolt against the sovereignty of God and an attempt to be God," said Richard D. Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Life Commission.
The loss of patent protection, however, might spell an end to companies like PPL Therapeutics, which is hoping to produce medicines from genetically engineered farm animals, by taking the potential profit away .
Boucher, who has co-authored patent-reform legislation to protect biotech manufacturing processes developed in the United States from rip-offs by foreign competitors, said he is convinced it's in the interest of improving the quality of life of Americans for the genetic advances to continue.
Aside from religious questions, others worry that biotechnology, specifically genetic engineering, could have adverse social and environmental consequences, such as developing genetic screening tests that would allow insurance companies to discriminate against people with predispositions for certain diseases or inadvertently transfering herbicide and pest resistance to weeds, leading to millions of dollars in new control costs.
"Our basic position is that biotechnology has some promise but only if used appropriately and carefully," said Eileen Quinn, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "In sum, biotech is not a silver bullet and could cause some significant problems unless society proceeds with caution."
The group criticized EPA's approval this month of a genetically engineered strain of cotton that is resistant to bromoxynil, a toxic herbicide, saying the agency should be moving to discourage the use of the herbicide, not expand its use. The union also has criticized an EPA decision of May 5 to allow commercialization of a genetically engineered potato that produces the naturally occurring insect toxin Bt, saying continuous exposure will accelerate the resistance of beetles to Bt and rob organic farmers of a valuable tool.
Defenders of biotechnology argue that stringent protections are already in place to protect the public from adverse consequences of biotechnology. "To date, not one safety or health concern has been attributed to the use" of genetic engineering, said J.T. Barach of the National Food Processors Association.
"Technology is fearful for people who don't understand it," said CropTech's Radin. "Scientists aren't interested in doing monstrous things any more than any one else," he said.
by CNB