Article Excerpt:
TWST: Would you give us a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time?Mr. Baum: We are a biotechnology company that is focused on using plants to produce pharmaceutical protein and other products for the pharmaceutical sector and then also for the non-pharmaceutical sector, including topical ingredients, nutritional oils, and animal and aquaculture health-related products. We are a spinout of the University of Calgary. Our Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Maurice Moloney, began work on this technology in the late 1980s at the University of Calgary. Maurice is one of the great plant molecular biologists alive today. In 1994, it became clear that the technology that Maurice was developing was capable of supporting an entire company. SemBioSys was then spun out of the University in 1994, and was really a commercially focused academic organization until 1998. When I joined the company, I had spent over 20 years in the agricultural biotechnology sector. And since that time, we have emerged and become one of the leading companies using plants to produce pharmaceutical proteins and other products around the world.
TWST: Is there a way to describe your basic technology in terms that a layman
could understand?
Mr. Baum: Basically, what we have done is developed a technology that will allow
us to transform the economics of pharmaceutical protein production. We do that
by combining the ability of the plants to produce proteins very inexpensively
with our technology platform's ability to allow us to extract and purify those
proteins in a very inexpensive way. When you take a look at the production
economics of protein production, it turns out that a significant portion, if not
a majority of the cost, is incurred in the actual extraction and purification.
So while a lot of people have been able to produce some proteins from plants,
they couldn't address downstream portions of the protein production process. Our
technology not only takes advantage of the ability to produce proteins
inexpensively but also allows us to extract and purify those proteins in a very,
very cost effective way. We believe that we can reduce capital cost of
facilities by 70% or more, and the production cost of goods by at the very least
40%.
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