GTC Biotherapeutics (fka GTCB)

[DewDiligence]

Here’s another player in transgenic plants
This article is from the local newspaper in
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/business/story.html?id=2b93d67e-63f2-4a0d-a082-1db1d...

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Biotech Company Ready to Lead Pack

By Murray Lyons
October 21, 2006

The head of one of Saskatoon's pioneering biotech companies, Prairie Plant Systems Inc. (PPS), says the company is ideally placed to be among the leaders in growing pharmaceutical drugs in plants.

Company president Brent Zettl says PPS's experience during the past six years growing medical marijuana for Health Canada in an underground growth chamber in part of an old Flin Flon copper mine has helped prepare his company for its next move into plant-based biopharmacy.

Zettl says the company has taken on a contract to grow a vaccine antibody against hepatitis C within plants. The deal was struck with the Saskatoon-based Vaccine Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO), which is developing the vaccine.

"We have embarked upon a program to look at ways to have the plants themselves manufacture this new hepatitis C vaccine," he said. "If we enter the global stage with this one, it is going to take a lot of time and money.

"It signals the beginning of a new era where plants can be designed to produce protein-based medicines."

It wasn't just Zettl touting a big future for PPS on Friday, as the company marked the opening of a new head office and laboratory just east of Boychuk Drive on Highway 16. The company has attracted an American expert to its board of directors in Brandon Price, the former CEO of Cognate Therapeutics Inc. and a vice-president with Cardinal Health, both companies that are big players in the biopharmaceutical industry.

Price says the cost of building huge bio-fermentation tanks to synthesize drugs on an industrial scale runs into the billions of dollars. In just one growing class of molecules being tested by pharmaceutical companies -- monoclonal antibodies, which are drugs that will be the next weapon against diseases such as cancer and heart disease -- Price predicted 45 per cent of these drug therapies will instead be produced by genetically inserting the antibodies into plants.

"Plants offer a very economic alternative and they are very efficient," Price said. "Surprisingly enough, plants such as tobacco plants or corn can make these very, very complex molecules as well as humans can."

Price predicts pharmaceutical companies that develop the monoclonal antibody class of drug will contract out the production of those molecules to companies that know how to grow such plants under strictly controlled conditions. The value of such contracts in 10 years could grow to $1.26 billion US annually, he predicted.

Prairie Plants was founded by Zettl and two other partners 18 years ago. Originally, the company was set up to clone saskatoon berry plants to get a more consistent variety that could aid commercial orchards in berry production.

The company is still involved in that work, but it has also created an environmental division that serves companies such as Cameco Corp. doing remediation work of mined-out landscapes by carefully propagating northern plants.

The company has 38 employees in Saskatoon, Flin Flon and a small underground growth chamber in Michigan.
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