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Company to grow potatoes for vaccine

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ~ Business News ~

Wisconsin USA

By Lee Bergquist, Journal Sentinel Staff

A Wisconsin company is collaborating on a project that could one day use potatoes to replace the to painful sting of a needle.

American Ag-Tec International Ltd. of Delavan has been hired by a British biotechnology company, Axis Genetics, to grow potatoes containing a vaccine for hepatitis B.

The Wisconsin company will grow the vaccine-laden potatoes this spring at an undisclosed farm in the central part of the state.

American Ag-Tec was selected for its expertise in rapidly growing disease-free "mini tubers" the first step in producing seed potatoes.

The vaccine was developed at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, N.Y.

Axis Genetics, which licensed the technology, also has a research agreement with Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York to conduct additional research.

In addition to hepatitis B, the research partners are developing other dible plant vaccines to guard against travelers' diarrhea, cholera and Norwalk virus infection.

The developers think that building up vaccine stocks by inserting a gene with the vaccine into the potatoes will be cheaper than traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing techniques.

Another advantage of an edible vaccine is that certain types of infections that enter the body through the nose or mouth are best neutralized with an antigen that activates an immune response from where the bugs strike. Most vaccines are injected and stimulate internal immune responses in blood or the cells of the body—and that might be less effective.

So far, mice and humans in clinical trials have eaten raw potatoes, though these high-tech tubers could be processed into another form in the future. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration must approve the potato vaccine before it can be sold commercially.

American Ag-Tec President Robert G. Britt said his company's contribution is its patented "Quantum Tubers" technology the by product of research from China, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's plant pathology department and the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics.

The privately held company was founded 17 years ago and generates most of its revenue marketing seeds and developing agribusiness projects around the world. One example: The company is a partner in a sweet corn canning factory in Jilin rovince in northeast China.

In 1995, the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized Britt as the Small Business Exporter of the Year for Wisconsin.

Through contacts he had made in previous visits to China, Britt as introduced to a method for the ultra-fast propagation of potatoes from a pair of Chinese scientists in the mid-1990s. At Britt's urging, the scientists came to UW-Madison to work at a research laboratory and demonstrate their technology.

The director of the lab was Thomas German, a plant pathologist and director of the Wisconsin Seed Potato Certification Program, which assures that commercial potato seeds are free of disease.

The Chinese scientists told German they knew of a method of eliminating up to five of the seven years that are needed to propagate disease-free seed tubers until they are produced in sufficient quantities for commercial potato growers. Potatoes aren't grown from seeds, but the eye of other potatoes and it usually takes years to propagate enough disease-free tubers to sell as a potato stocks.

"I was pretty skeptical and so I said 'prove it,' " German recalled. "And they did."

German was impressed and is convinced that the Chinese innovations and other improvements will lead to major time reductions in bringing new potato seed stocks to market.

American Ag-Tec bought the rights to the research from the Chinese.

After additional research involving the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation Research and UW-Madison, the company patented the technology and is starting to market it worldwide.

American Ag-Tec has already licensed the technology for disease-free mini tubers in Poland and will sell potato propagation equipment there this spring where the ailing Polish potato industry has been hit by a broad array of viruses. The company is also selling equipment in Egypt.

The technology is twofold: The mini tubers are grown in an enclosed plant-growth chamber so that water, light and temperature can be manipulated to maximize growth. In addition, the Chinese researchers were adept at applying chemical growth regulators during key stages of development.

Britt said that his company benefited from research in plant-growth chambers developed at the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics, which works to commercialize NASA research.

American Ag-Tec is using a controlled growing environment housed at UW-Madison and is paying the university for its use.

One reason that this spring's high-tech potato crop location is not being disclosed is because growing genetically engineered plants is controversial—though by no means uncommon in American agriculture. UW's German said that more than 3 million acres of genetically engineered crops are under cultivation today—everything from corn and soybeans to papaya.

The potato in this project has been genetically engineered to make hepatitis B antigens.

But despite concerns in some quarters, raising genetically engineered plants elicits even more emotion in Europe, so Axis Genetics was interested in growing its medicinal potatoes in the U.S., Britt said.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 1, 1999