BIO 2008: Born free, Selborne free

The UK's loss was Tasmania's gain when the BSE crisis in the late 1980s caused a rethink in Selborne's business plan. The East Hampshire company, set up in the town of Selborne in the 1970s for the filtration of serum, was forced to look elsewhere when strict controls on animal - especially bovine - derived products were introduced to prevent any contamination by BSE.

It first settled on Tauranga in New Zealand in the early nineties but has since moved to Tasmania, where it runs a GMP facility in a picturesque farm at Longford.

Here it manufactures a range of cell culture products for use in the production of biopharmaceuticals and in diagnostic and research applications. But while Tasmania is perfect for manufacturing these products, being judged as it is at the lowest level of risk for BSE contamination possible, the Australasian market is just too small for the company's potential.

This is why it has set up its sales, marketing and distribution centre in Logan, in the state of Utah, to tap into the USA's vast market. And this is where the company's sales and marketing director, Vic Phillips, first came on board in 2005.

"The Tasmania site is our primary manufacturing facility. However, since the US market is one of the largest in the world, it seemed like a reasonable place to base our marketing activities," Phillips says. "In addition to the manufacturing site in Tasmania, we still have an office in the UK that services our European market, but most of the marketing functions are performed here.

"It wasn't a good idea to be a UK-based biologics company in the late 1980s so Selborne was looking for some good safe havens from which to operate a facility and expand. The decision to move to Australia was simple. Australia, like NZ, offered a safe haven for biologics manufacturing, but also a much larger animal pool for raw materials combined with a strong regulatory oversight. The Australian government obviously understands the value and preeminent position of it biologics industry within the global market and is keen to protect it."

Selborne's primary products include a whole array of predominantly animal sera of various species, including bovine, ovine, chicken, horse and rabbit, and a large number of protein fractions. Its range of products fall under the banners of diagnostics, including gamma globulin; protein fractions; and cell culture.

The company's headline product is Lipimax, a highly purified lipoprotein solution or lipid concentrate for use as a nutritional supplement for cell culture media. It is derived from serum from adult Australian cattle and has a balanced profile of naturally occurring cholesterol, phospholipids and essential fatty acids, Phillips says.

Phillips says the company has four primary markets - biopharmaceuticals, including therapeutic products for the human health industry such as vaccines, cancer drugs and anti-inflammatory drugs; the biotech sector, including research and development of new medicines; bioveterinary industry, including products for animal health; and the diagnostic products market.

In the future, it hopes to add more proteins to its product folio, and to further the commercialisation of Lipimax. "We have invested heavily in the development of Lipimax, and the process to get from introduction to the market on through the vast machinery of approval is huge," he says.

"Our plan is really to focus on commercialisation of what we have and then to add complementary proteins to the mix. That would include such things as specialised albumin, perhaps transferin and looking beyond, at synthetic alternatives, to where our customers would have the opportunity to go from a wholly animal-derived source material to products that are more purified in the sense that they are completely characterised and known. Then we may formulate rather than simply provide a purified protein."