Des Moines Register
04-12-06
Pharmaceutical crops could have future in Iowa
PHILIP BRASHER
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
Chicago, Ill. – Growing corn for pharmaceutical uses could have a future in Iowa,
despite lingering concerns about engineering food crops for medicine.
Bill Horan, a Rockwell City farmer who specializes in growing pharmaceutical
crops, said today that he expects to have two experimental plots of
pharmaceutical corn this year.
One will be on the Horan farm in Calhoun County for Meristem Therapeutics, a
French company developing a drug for cystic fibrosis patients.
The other plot will be for Iowa State University and located on a university farm
near Rhodes, said Horan, who was attending the Biotechnology Industry
Organization's trade show.
Meristem is also in talks with Iowa State University about doing the processing
for its corn at an ISU facility in Ames, said Jean-Paul Rohmer, the company's
president and chief executive.
Meristem already is growing the crops in France and Chile but needs production
in the United States to serve the American market when the drug is
commercialized, Rohmer said. The company wants to commercialize the product
in 2009.
"The U.S. market is the largest market. We need to have production in the U.S.,"
he said.
Another company, FibroGen of South San Francisco, Calif., is working with
scientists at Iowa State to develop a type of corn that drug makers can use for
making gelatin for capsules.
"Iowa is going to become the center of the PMP (plant-made pharmaceutical)
processing universe, and not just with Meristem," said Horan.
Horan has previously conducted field trials but Meristem. However, cultivation of
pharmaceutical crops briefly left the state after a biotech company, ProdiGene
Inc., was caught mismanaging experimental plots in Iowa and Nebraska in 2002.
Iowa had a single field of pharmaceutical corn last year, which was cultivated by
Horan for Iowa State on an isolated portion of land belonging to the Iowa Army
Ammunition Plant near Middletown.
Food companies have strongly opposed using food crops like corn for
pharmaceuticals. Another company, Ventria BioScience, ran into opposition from
brewing giant Anheuser-Busch when the biotech firm wanted to grow
pharmaceutical rice in Missouri. The company is growing the crop in North
Carolina and South America instead.
"There is still a fundamental conflict there" between the biotech and food
companies, said Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on
Food and Biotechnology.
The U.S. Agriculture Department tightened its planting restrictions for
pharmaceutical and industrial crops following the Prodigene incident. However,
an internal investigation last year found that USDA was still not overseeing the
crops properly. A report by the department's inspector general said the agency
"lacks basic information" on where the field tests were or what was done after
crops were harvested. USDA officials said they were addressing the concerns.
USDA's rules require that fields be inspected seven times before, during and
after production. And to prevent cross-pollination of conventional corn, the
pharmaceutical plots must be kept a half-mile to a mile away from other corn
fields and planted later in the growing season.
Scott Deeter, president and chief executive of Ventria, said the restrictions are
needed to restore public confidence in the industry.
"If we over-invest in that in the front end, I think that's a small price to
pay for the benefit that will come a decade later," he said.
Ventria hopes to commercialize an anti-diarrheal medication made with proteins
produced in its biotech rice.
But Meristem's Rohmer said the restrictions are excessive. In France, the
pharmaceutical fields can be four times closer to conventional corn fields than
USDA allows. "It's really overdoing it."
Meristem will need 1,500 kilograms, about 3,300 pounds, of protein worldwide for
its cystic fibrosis drug, the equivalent of 2,500 acres of corn.
"It's quite manageable, spread over two or three countries," he said.
FibroGen's gelatin product is still at least seven years from reaching market and
would be much larger in scale. Up to a million acres of the corn would be
needed, so the company plans to seek federal safety approvals that would allow
it to be grown anywhere, said Julio Baez, a scientist with the company. He said
the corn-based gelatin would be safer than the gelatin now made from the
remains of cattle and hogs.
Horan thinks that the fledgling industry is turning a corner with the public.
"People are getting over the wild promises and settling down to reality," he said.
"I think people are understanding that the regulatory process is working, and the
companies that are in this business are companies that have good leadership,
good reputations."