Funding for bioscience companies | The Saskatchewan organization supports biotech research and helps start-up companies get on their feet
One of agricultural biotechnology’s biggest cheerleaders has been waving the pom-poms for a quarter of a century.
“We needed a catalyst for the industry and that is exactly the role that Ag-West played,” Alanna Koch, Sask-atchewan’s deputy minister of agriculture, said during Ag-West Bio’s 25th anniversary celebration.
“It could drive strategic direction and it also advocated on behalf of the industry.”
Since its establishment in 1989, Ag-West has invested $12.9 million in 57 start-up bioscience companies.
Those investments generated an estimated $1.2 billion in gross domestic product, according to a paper by Stuart Smyth, professional research associate with University of Saskatchewan’s college of agriculture.
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The non-profit marketing and networking organization got its start with a $9 million provincial government grant.
Part of its role has been to attract businesses and research organizations to Saskatchewan. Its first target was the Belgian company, Plant Genetic Systems Inc.
Since then it has helped land major players such as the Canadian Light Source and the Global Institute for Food Security, helping make Saskatoon a global leader in agricultural biotechnology and associated research.
“(Ag-West) has become a very credible, well-respected national voice for agricultural biotechnology in Canada,” said Koch.
“In the past five years Ag-West has hosted on average more than 15 networking events per year — a very, very busy schedule for the organization,” said Koch.
Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, thinks Ag-West should have taken a different tack over the past 25 years.
“It would be helpful if Ag-West Bio was to take on a position that was more aligned with the consumer concerns,” she said.
Sharratt believes the organization should have promoted more robust regulation of biotechnology and mandatory labelling; two steps that could have assuaged consumer concerns about genetic modification that still exist today.
And she feels the focus on private sector research has come at a cost.
“Ag-West Bio has failed to stand up for public research in Canada. Over the past decades we’ve seen the demise of a lot of research that farmers and the industry rely on,” said Sharratt.
Ag-West president Wilf Keller said the province showed foresight when it decided to fund the organization in 1989.
“It was a time when biotechnology was just getting started and the provincial leaders obviously concluded that this is going to be a very important area,” he said.
Keller said Ag-West has helped turn start-up companies into thriving medium-sized firms. Examples are Phenomenome Discovers, a company that develops human disease screening, treatment and health monitoring products and Prairie Plant Systems, the first licensed producer of medical marijuana approved by Health Canada.
He said the future is bright for Canada’s biotechnology sector.
“The whole emerging field of genomics is just catching fire now,” he said.
“Genomics-based and precision-based breeding and strain development will be the name of the game 15 years from now for sure.”
He is also excited about bioremediation, which uses microbes and plants to detoxify contaminated sites associated with the mining and oil industries.
Ag-West sees a bright future for using straw and grain hulls in the production of biochemicals and for using the synchrotron at the Canadian Light Source to develop a further understanding of roots, water uptake and nutrient movement in plants.
