| Maine pushes
biotech growth
InterfaceNow
January 27, 2003
By
Paul L. Young PORTLAND,
Maine — Just as Maine's natural beauty
and resources were an open secret accessible only to
natives and the wealthy ‘from away' one hundred
years ago, its long history of biotechnology industries
serving animal health and husbandry, agriculture, forestry
and aquaculture has gone largely unacknowledged by
Wall Street and venture capital and government funding
sources.
A loose federation of federal and state agencies,
scientists, academic institutions and technology industries
has emerged to bring proper recognition to Maine's
strong biotech tradition and, in particular, to the
underestimated but burgeoning businesses and nonprofits
that make up its present-day biotech sector.
With biotechnology one of seven sectors targeted by
the Maine Legislature in 1999 for development assistance,
that federation is becoming increasingly formal. A
mounting body of industrial research stresses the competitive
advantages and necessity of such governmental aid in
building robust industrial sectors where they are marginal
or do not exist.
Quasi-private
units of [Maine State Government] — Maine
International Trade Center, Maine Technology Institute
(MTI), Maine Science and Technology Foundation (MSTF) — have
been highly proactive in anticipating and funding the
growth needs of the legislature's target sectors, which
also include information technology, advanced materials
and composites, precision manufacturing, marine technology
and aquaculture, forest products and agriculture, and
environmental technology.
Maine
has put its money where its mouth is. State-funded
R&D has risen from $2 million in 1991 to $41 million
last year. The objective has been to build technological
infrastructure overall, and to encourage local maturation
of biotechnology industries through the formation of
the most supportive, most nourishing environments.
Professionals call it ‘cluster development' and
believe it is essential in improving the odds for building
successful technology businesses.
In
June 2002, MSTF and The Muskie School of the University
of Southern Maine released Assessing Maine's Technology
Clusters, a major report evaluating development strengths
and weaknesses among the state's seven target sectors. "Relationships
are the key distinguishing feature of clusters," wrote
former MSTF president Joel B. Russ in his preface to
the report. "A rich network of relationships must
exist between companies, suppliers, service providers
and supporting institutions such as universities, colleges,
research labs and industry associations.
"Cluster
formation occurs when this network of relationships
provides a competitive advantage to all
related firms in the region."
"MSTF concluded that biotech is a potential star
for Maine," said Richard J. Coyle, president of
the International Trade Center (MITC) here, which has
been instrumental in pushing forward the state's biotech
agenda in the U. S. and abroad. Fiercely advocating
commercialization of biotech R&D, MITC helps startup
and established firms identify markets for their products
worldwide and formulate strategies for appropriate
partnering and sales.
For
example, MITC named Hardwood Products Co., of Guilford,
as its exporter of the year. Established
in 1919, the firm moved with market demand. Originally
manufacturing minted toothpicks, Hardwood Products
now exports to 42 countries, "producing a wide
array of devices for the healthcare field and specialty
products used for DNA testing, anthrax detection and
food safety," according to MITC international
trade specialist Andrew MacDonald. Hardwood Products
staff have attended MITC seminars on "marketing
overseas, ocean cargo, export documentation and Canadian
and Mexican markets," MacDonald said.
Last month MITC, Citizens Bank, The Jackson Laboratory
and DeLorme sponsored a half-day briefing on Biotechnology
in the Global Marketplace.
The meeting drew about 100 representatives from Maine's
biotech community, venture and consulting firms, government
development agencies and European organizations in
Paris and Northern Ireland. Observers described it
as the largest assembly of biotech interests in the
state to date.
Coyle said that such federal agencies as NASA and
the Department of Defense are only now recognizing
Maine's emergence as a coming biotech power and that
their funding participation is not just timely, but
critical.
"At
the stage where Maine is, there's going to have to
be more government involvement to take industry
to the next phase. It's our job to figure out how to
plug into these federal dollar flows that are coming
into Maine. But this is why we have to work together.
MITC can't do it alone."
Last
year, more than half the federal government's $80
million R&D funding for Maine institutions
went to the Jackson Lab, which employs 27 percent of
the state's 4,500-member scientific community. Maine
is 46th among the states in the amount of federal R&D
funds received and 44th in the amount received per
capita.
It is 50th in the amount of research performed by
colleges and universities, spending $1.09 per $1,000
of Gross State Product versus $2.81 spent as the national
median.
However, the focus on building government-industry
interrelationships is having an effect. Maine is now
one of 19 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
eligible for a federal-state partnership called the
Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research
(EPSCoR), designed to build the state's science and
engineering infrastructure.
The
program reports that $7 million in state awards over
the past five years has leveraged $22 million
in federal and private R&D funding.
Last
June, Jackson Lab signed on as the anchor tenant
in the new 20-acre Thomas M. Teague Biotechnology
Center
in Fairfield. The biotech park will also be home to
the International Northeast Biotechnology Corridor,
a U. S.—Canadian regional association of Maine,
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Nova Scotia,
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Newfoundland
and Labrador. Former Maine Rep. Paul Tessier, chief
mover behind the park, heads the Corridor.
The Jackson Lab in turn forms the nexus of the Maine
Biomedical Research Coalition with the Maine Medical
Center Research Foundation, the Foundation for Blood
Research, Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory
and the University of New England College of Osteopathic
Medicine. The Maine Legislature last year voted the
coalition $7 million to jump-start its ability to attract
federal research dollars.
It has since returned $8.3 million to the state in
income and sales taxes and indirect revenue, created
nearly 600 non-research jobs in building trades and
$18 million in payrolls, according to the group's figures.
The
University of Maine system has proposed to link its
facilities with nonprofit research labs in the
state in a "virtual biomedical research institute," enabling
participants to benefit from federal biomedical research
expenditures that are expected to double within five
years.
Biotech
in Agriculture
As the public understands it today, biotech is about
fifty years old, dating from the 1953 discovery by
Francis Crick and James Watson of the double helix
structure of DNA. When we think of biotech we usually
think of high-tech genetic manipulation, pharmaceutical
drug research and the federal mission to map the human
genome.
But
according to Pamela Peters, author of Biotechnology:
A Guide to Genetic Engineering, the term defines "the
use of living organisms or their products to modify
human health and the human environment." As such,
biotech dates from our earliest attempts as a species
to breed domesticated animals, grow more resilient
crops or make wine.
Since the 1970s and the dominance of big agribusiness
in U. S., Canadian and European food production, our
concept of it has come full circle. Biotech also has
come to mean the genetically modified foods we eat.
Because of its connection with established giants
like Monsanto and Cargill, agriculture as a sector
is generally assessed outside any discussion of biotech's
sector growth needs. Maine is still 56 percent rural,
however; its agricultural industries and the state's
farmers are deeply influenced by developments in crop
technologies.
So
are consumers, and with a lot less information to
act on. According to Douglas R. Johnson, a principal
of GreenTree Communications, a biotech advocacy firm
in Stonington, four states – Maine, Colorado,
Oregon and Vermont – have been targeted by the
opponents of agricultural biotech for rolling back
recent gains made in the law and among non-organic
farmers.
Johnson,
who holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, said the
Maine Legislature has passed strict requirements
on the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods
and on the planting of GM crops. But this session will
assess a bill establishing a ‘moratorium' on
release of any GM plant or animal outside its area
of use; in short, a quarantine on subjects and crop
output.
"The implications are that Maine farmers wouldn't
have the technology available to them that farmers
in other parts of the country would have," Johnson
said. "All we want to do is to encourage you to
include science in your consideration of this issue."
It
is an irony of the controversy that the vast majority
of U. S. commodity crops are already GM – approximately
a third of corn, 70 percent of cotton and 75 percent
of soybeans, according to Johnson. In addition, the
U. S. Department of Agriculture also has approved GM
alfalfa, wheat, canola beans and rice, and is evaluating
GM grassy turf.
In
1999, John Jemison planted experimental acreage of "Bt" corn,
a GM strain that reduces the use of pesticides by
discouraging feeding by corn borers.
The Ph.D. water quality and soil specialist with the
University of Maine's Cooperative Extension fundamentally
was trying to find alternatives to a harmful pesticide
called atrazine, which had been seeping into ground
water in the state.
Opponents of Bt corn burned down half Jemison's experimental
crop.
"I don't know of any conventional farmer opposed
to [GM crop yield]," said Jim Crane of Crane Brothers
Farms, Exeter. Before planting Bt potatoes, Crane said,
late blight pesticide spraying in spring might have
required once-a-week application over 1,200 acres.
"If we could eliminate that fungicide, or at
least reduce it, it would be a huge savings of money
and pesticides going into the environment," Crane
said. "Twenty years ago, corn yields in the state
weren't nearly what they are today."
Maine's Farm Bureau is serving the needs of the state's
farmers and agricultural industries in the same way
MITC is serving biotech startups wishing to export,
with information calculated to increase productivity
and competitiveness sector-wide.
Like
biomedical research, agricultural biotech is a permanent
feature of the nation's economy. After
all, says Jim Crane, ‘There never was such a
thing as a yellow rose." | 
