The Queensland University of Technology is going into the genetic engineering business. The historic university, which has grown up around the original residence of the Queensland governor alongside the State Parliament in Brisbane, plans to produce proteins.
"We are raising venture capital, not to license off our technology, but to become
a production company in Australia for producing proteins in plants," said James Dale, who leads a programme aimed at making bananas, pawpaw and sugar cane resistant to viruses.
Professor Dale was speaking at a breakfast for 130 people - including a fair number of the venture capitalists who may be able to fund his proposed business. It was one of a regular series of Biolink breakfasts organised by the state Government. Venture capitalists and other potential investors wore red dots on their name tags - researchers such as Professor Dale had green dots. The purpose of the event was to bring them together.
With just 3.5 million people, Queensland is big on cooperation. It has big ambitions. Mike Norris, an advertising executive who chairs the business-led Committee of Brisbane, talked of a strategy to make Brisbane the venture funds capital of the Asia-Pacific region.
"If all the cards fall correctly, it will be the largest venture capital operation in the Southern Hemisphere," he said.
And it works as a team. John Kenny, director of the Queensland BioIndustries Taskforce, talked of a shared leadership of business, academics and government.
In May 1999, well before the Federal Government's innovation package was unveiled, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie allocated $A270 million ($338.5 million) to the state's 10-year BioIndustries Strategy, aiming to make Queensland "the Asia-Pacific hub of biotechnology."
Apart from the Biolink breakfasts, the strategy includes $A90 million for building and running the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at Queensland University, $A30 million to expand the State's Health Scientific Services laboratories, $A20 million for cancer research at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research, $A8 million for biotech research at Griffith University's Gold Coast campus, plus venture capital to help businesses leverage off the Federal Government's $A40 million Biotechnology Innovation Fund.
The strategy also aims to market Queensland to international biotech investors through events such as the Bio 2001 trade fair held in San Diego last month.
One of Queensland's advantages in this marketing drive is that its universities are involved in six biotech-related Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs), under a federal scheme that brings together government, academic and industry researchers.
One of these, the CRC for Diagnostic Technologies, is based at the Queensland University of Technology, although many of its 39 fulltime-equivalent staff work at the Brisbane-based biotech company PanBio, the privately owned Queensland Medical Laboratories, and other universities and federal laboratories in Sydney and Melbourne.
"The reason for bringing those people together is to provide a focus for converting academic ideas and intellectual property into commercial realities," said deputy director, Phillip Morris.
He said five multinational companies supplied 80 per cent of the tests used to check whether patients have particular diseases. "Everyone else is excluded by their patents. What we are trying to do is to break that intellectual property barrier so that Australian companies can compete in a niche.
"It's very easy for people to say, 'How can Australian and New Zealand companies compete with those billion-dollar companies?'
"But we are innovative people. An idea comes from one person. Some of those very large companies become very unwieldy, inflexible, it's hard for them to take up change. So there is an opportunity."
PanBio, a small company of 50 people, has commercialised test kits for three diseases based on the CRC's work. It pays the CRC a licence fee and has become the world leader in tests for animal-borne and mosquito-borne diseases.
Chief executive Mel Bridges, who worked in the diagnostics industry before founding PanBio, said he and three colleagues started the company 12 years ago because "I was frustrated to see Australian technology commercialised offshore."
Now a huge map of the world covers a whole wall in PanBio's boardroom, showing the 55 countries where PanBio tests are used.
"The Singapore Government has tried to lure us to relocate there with zero tax and significant research and development investment," Mr Bridges said. "We don't see that has any attractions. We would lose a lot of the expertise we have here, so it comes back to a lifestyle consideration. We also value the relationship with the CRC."
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The Queensland University of Technology is going into the genetic engineering business. The historic university, which has grown up around the original residence of the Queensland governor alongside the State Parliament in Brisbane, plans to produce proteins.
"We are raising venture capital, not to license off our technology, but to become
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