HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
Biotechnology and the future of Australian agriculture
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26 July 2005
Session 3: Reporting back and discussion
Group E: Pharming/new products
Rapporteur: Dr Chris Blanchard
What we were talking about is pharming, with a ‘ph’. Actually, that reminds me of what my kids say. If something’s good, they say it’s ‘phat’, with a ‘ph’. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that kind of terminology – it’s a sort of young hip terminology. So I can see some similarities with farming as a very traditional and exciting pursuit, but pharming with a ‘ph’ is a really good way of farming, because potentially there’s a lot more benefits there.
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The first point that we talked about was productivity. But of course before you talk about productivity, you need to talk about what is the product that you are actually going to pursue. It is very important to choose your product carefully, because there is no point in choosing something that you don’t actually need to produce, or that is available already. So that’s the very first thing that you need to decide.
The next thing that you need to think about is, ‘Okay, we’ve got this product that we want to produce. We shouldn’t just rush in and say, “Okay, I’ve got a really good GM idea of making this. Let’s go for it.”’ What you should be doing is exploring all of the opportunities. Are there any non-GM approaches to achieving this particular solution?
If there aren’t any particular non-GM approaches, you can go ahead and say, ‘Okay, let’s come up with a GM solution here.’ And when you are coming up with a GM solution, you have got a whole lot of questions then you need to ask.
Maybe the first one is, ‘Well, what is the system that we want to use here?’ All the different systems have their pros and cons. We’ve talked a lot about plants – I guess in our group we may have talked about plants more than the others – and certainly plants are a very good system for producing GM products. It is a low-cost system, I guess, generally; it is scalable, so it’s easy to do thousands of hectares of plants; and in some cases there are some really good containment options. So, if you are choosing a plant which is not an outcrosser, something like rice, it is pretty easy to contain your product. But if you are using something like canola, of course, there are a whole lot of issues that you need to think about there.
Animals is another very important system, and there are some products that we just can’t make in plants – things where, for example, we may need glycosolation of proteins. We just have to use animals for that sort of a scenario. Another advantage that animals have is that generally it is something that can be pretty well contained. Someone said that it was a lot easier to shoot a GM cow than it is to maybe try and contain pollen in a paddock situation.
Microbes is another option. Again that is something which is very easily scalable. You can start off with a test tube and produce a large fermenter full of a product. And the good thing about that is that we have already got very good systems for producing large quantities of, say, yeasts. We have brewing systems already; we already know about the systems that are in place for scaling up that production.
There are a whole lot of other things that you need to consider. Once you have produced your product, then how easy is it to extract? It’s no good being able to produce large amounts of a product and not being able to get it in a pure form.
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On the environment, I guess we were struggling a little bit about what we needed to address here. So we split it into two sections.
The first section was really talking about: what can biopharming do for the environment? Certainly there are a lot of examples where we can actually use biopharming to improve the environment.
The first example there is bioremediation. I guess one example of that would be to introduce genes into your micro-organisms; that produces a protein which may be an enzyme that can degrade herbicides in a paddock. And that GM product can be expressed in a fermentation system, purified and spread into paddocks, or you can take directly the GM microbe and spread it around the paddock. Both of those systems have got different pros and cons.
I guess biofuels is a way that we can actually improve the environment, by reducing the amount of oil that we are using, for, I guess, more of a green sort of a system.
Another example is bioindicators, so we can engineer fish or plants which are good indicators of whether a site maybe is contaminated. Someone brought up the example of a plant which maybe, if you introduce a gene into it, will change colour, for example if there is heavy metal contamination. So that’s a way that biopharming can actually help improve, clean up the environment.
But, of course, in biopharming it is very important that we choose the correct environment. Australia actually has some advantages in terms of the environment. We have a huge amount of flora and fauna that we can use as a resource for searching for new genes to produce products which may have some kind of commercial applications.
Another important aspect that Australia has is diversity in environment. One of the things that we talked a lot about is that it is no good for us to maybe design a plant that can be only grown in CSIRO’s experimental plot, because it’s a very difficult thing to maybe market in Hawaii or something like that. We have got such a diversity of environments that we can develop products from tropical to temperate environments, and then sell those products into all the environments throughout the world. So that’s another advantage that we have.
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We talked about the value chain being something that has to be considered, because there are so many aspects to the value chain that we need to consider when developing new products.
One of the most important things is that, okay, we can maybe produce this fantastic protein that’s going to save the world, but how much does it cost to actually produce that? So these are the questions that need to be added before we even start doing the research.
The feasibility of production: okay, we can do it, but maybe only on a very small scale, and it’s never going to be at a scale that is actually going to be useful.
The other thing is the cost of protection. The protection of our knowledge is extremely important. There’s no point in doing something that we can’t protect. It’s important that we have some way of protecting our knowledge so that someone doesn’t just come along and take it, and replicate our work.
The other question that we really need to ask is: who is going to pay for the research, who is going to pay for the product? There’s no point in going out and producing a product that we scientists think is just absolutely fantastic and the world is going to need it. We need to do some market research and ask, ‘Okay, if we do produce this protein, is there someone out there that will need to buy it?’
Also we need to consider global competition. Are there other people out there making it? Can they do it more cheaply? That’s another important question.
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We have split the social aspect up into two sections. The first one is ethics.
We heard Craig Cormick talking about the social aspect of producing some of these products. I guess it was the opinion of our group that maybe the best way to proceed is to choose the path of least resistance. So in choosing the path of least resistance we are talking about: maybe let’s concentrate more on things which are not going to be consumed as food products, and once we can get those products out into the marketplace that will improve consumer acceptance and, hopefully, the food products can then follow.
The other important thing is early inclusion. That is consultation with the community right at the outset. Rather than getting to the point of market release and saying, ‘Look, guys, we’ve got this great product. What do you think?’ let’s get input right at the start of the process.
It is very important that we consider consumers in this whole process. There is no point, again, in choosing a product that maybe is really good for the scientists, because it looks good on our CV or whatever. Let’s make things that are actually going to be of benefit for the consumers.
And it is important that we think very carefully about the risks associated with the products that we are producing. Let’s produce things which are not likely to interfere with our health, not likely to interfere with the environment.
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I guess our take home message is that it is important to choose the right product, it is important to choose the right system, and it is important to consider the environment in your experiments. It needs to be socially acceptable, but if we can’t answer all these questions we need to have the courage to say, ‘No, maybe this is not a good product to produce at the moment.’
And it is important that we reward those people who are really producing things that are adding a lot of value to our community.
Discussion
Question – Did you explore the ‘killer app’ that’s going to transform the market, such as an anti-dementia product for senescing Baby Boomers like me?
Chris Blanchard – No. We did come up with one; it was actually to produce something that would get rid of the ageing characteristics of women. If we could come up with that, that would be the killer app.
Question – I remember a few years ago sitting in on a talk by Dupont where they modelled the costs of producing products by biopharming versus doing it in their own factories, or the factories that they sell out to. They sat down and picked a product which they thought had the right achievability, the right marketplace and the best potential to replace a traditionally produced product in a chemical factory. And the only way they could get it to break even was if they onsold absolutely else, like the waste from the feed, the waste from the production – every part of the process, to just break even with the product. So it wasn’t an easy way to find the value.
Chris Blanchard – Absolutely. We had a lot of discussion about asking those questions of how much it does cost to produce, before you even embark on this. It’s not so simple.
Question – I might say that the killer app – an anti-dementia product – was mentioned, but you’ve just forgotten it!
More seriously: this is aligned to the previous question. Are the products to begin on out there? We are now used to this word ‘biopharming’, but now that people are used to the word they are trying to see something to focus on. It is really the same question as before, in a sense, but is there something that the biotechnological industry or the research industry could begin to focus on, whether it be a plant or an animal product that actually was out there – whether it is the insulin that someone talked about this morning. Is that the killer app?
Chris Blanchard – I think that’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. Is there the insulin or the whatever it is out there? Possibly there is, but while ever we have moratoriums in place in different states it is going to be difficult to maybe see some of those things.
Another point that was raised in our group was that what we should be doing, instead of having different states imposing moratoriums – one state saying, ‘No, we don’t want to do this,’ but other places, like Queensland, saying, ‘Yes, we want to do it’ – there should be more of a national approach. Australia should be putting up its hand and saying, ‘Yes, this is the way that we want to go,’ to choose those killer apps and go with those initially.
Question – This is just a quick comment. I think we should avoid this term ‘killer application’. It just makes no sense. ‘Killer’ is such an inflammatory word anyway. There’s got to be something else. I’ve just heard so many people use it, but you have got to think of people that are downstream. When you say, ‘Oh, this is the killer application that’s going to come to market,’ I don’t think that’s going to work either. But maybe it’s semantics.
Chris Blanchard – I think it’s a good point.
