Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In Nebraska, ProdiGene did not remove the volunteers despite the
order to do so issued by inspectors of the USDA-APHIS. Thus, the
volunteer pharm maize was harvested together with the soybean plants.
About 14,000 tons of soybeans were subsequently put in quarantine by
APHIS and ProdiGene reportedly purchased the entire batch of soy-
beans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated that the
incident caused only minimal risks, if any. Nevertheless, economic dam-
ages in this case were considerable: fines and financial damage were
reported to have amounted to some US$3 million and eventually led to
the bankruptcy of ProdiGene. In this case total economic damage was
small compared to StarLink but, according to several commentators, the
incident nevertheless caused a severe setback for the molecular farming
industry - in particular for those developing food crops as production
platforms for nonfood substances.
EuropeanUnion:CatchingUp
In the EU, commercial R&D activities in molecular farming have been
increasing over recent years: some twenty-four companies are active in
this field, most of them specialized in this technology.
28
Recently, Bayer
and BASF, two large EU-based multinational companies, moved into
the arena. Two SMU-type companies, Cobento and Meristem Thera-
peutics, seem to be closer to market commercialization (see Table 1).
Cobento recently filed an application under EU Regulation 1829/2003
on GM food and feed for producing human intrinsic factor protein from
Arabidopsis thaliana
cultivated in greenhouses. The protein is intended
to be used as a nutraceutical food supplement against vitamin B12 defi-
ciency. Meristem is producing its gastric lipase in open field produc-
tion using maize (presently on 20 hectares in France) and anticipates
28
A. Sp ok, Molecular Farming on the Rise-GMO Regulators Still Walking a Tightrope,
25
Trends in Biotechnology
74-82 (2007).
