An oilseed researcher says the new company he has established could increase flax production across the Prairies.
Martin Reaney, president of Prairie Tide Chemicals Inc., also said it could add value to prairie flax and increase the crop’s use in wide variety of consumer goods.
Reaney, a University of Saskatchewan scientist, said recent research has found a unique and valuable component in flax oil.
The components, called peptides, are small circular strings of amino acids whose unique structure makes them strong and chemically stable.
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Reaney said they are abundant in flax and can be isolated from flax oil using specialized machinery recently installed at the U of S.
“There are lots of components in flax oil and we’ve found something … that is very valuable,” Reaney said.
“This is a building material. A raw material that has all sorts of applications.
“These peptides are amazing structures. We’ve got quite an amazing molecule that can be used in … drugs, catalysts, flat panel displays, solar cells and any other number of things.”
Reaney said pharmaceuticals are one of the most promising applications for peptides, including specialized drugs that have the potential to fight cancer.
The global pharmaceutical industry is valued at nearly $1 trillion annually and is growing by five to seven percent per year.
Prairie Tide Chemicals has registered patents related to the isolation, modification and use of peptides derived from raw flax oil.
It has applied for proprietary control over processes that can isolate 1.6 kilograms of concentrated peptides from a tonne of raw flax.
After isolation and purification, the concentrated peptides exist as a highly valuable coloured powder.
“That may not seem like a lot but if you look at the cost of peptides and the volume of the Canadian crop, we could probably get about 600,000 kilograms of this material from the Canadian flax crop,” Reaney said.
Some manufacturing companies are paying as much as $10,000 per kilogram for artificially produced molecules that have similar properties, he added.
“You can make peptides and certainly you can buy them by the milligram … but scaling these things up (for commercial production) is fairly expensive,” Reaney said.
“Stringing together amino acids is a very expensive thing to do.”
Peptides’ unique circular structure is what makes them so valuable.
In most cases, naturally occurring strings of amino acids exist in a chain-like structure, with two distinct ends. That structure makes them weak and unstable.
Reaney said peptides’ circular structure gives them properties similar to a cup. Matter contained inside the cup can be isolated from the surrounding environment.
With some modification, different peptides derived from flax can be tailored for use in specialized manufacturing applications.
Reaney and other researchers have identified at least 11 types of peptides and have isolated all but one using processes patented by Prairie Tide.
Mapping the flax genome has also allowed researchers to identify a link between the production of flax peptides and two specific genes in the flax plant.
“We know that there’s at least two specific genes for peptides and we think there’s a lot more,” said Reaney.
Researchers around the world are studying the medicinal properties of consuming peptides in raw flax oil. Animal studies show that consuming raw flax results in the absorption of peptides into the tissues of some types of livestock.
Reaney said removing peptides from raw flax oil will not diminish the value of flax oil used for industrial purposes.
Reaney formed Prairie Tide to assist with the development of processes used to isolate and modify peptides.
Ideally, the concentrated peptides will eventually be made available to other companies that value their unique qualities and highly stable molecular structure.
Reaney said Prairie Tide Chemicals is like a process incubator, moving valuable research discoveries to a stage where they can be commercialized, adapted and used by the private sector.
He said commercialization plays a big role in ensuring that private sector industry can make use of public research.
It is also critical to developing new high-value markets for crops that are grown in Canada and sold as low-value commodities.
“Often, it isn’t the vegetable oil that’s the interesting part, it’s the little bits of other things that are in the vegetable oil,” he said.
“The vegetable oil is the commodity. It’s the other things where the value is (located).”
