How to surf the GM-testing wave

If there’s money in muck, there’s also moolah in mania, according to molecular geneticist Dr Roland Toder, who built the Freiburg-based biotech company GeneScan Europe into the world’s leading gene-testing company for food and food ingredients.

Now CEO of his own biotech consulting company, Toder told last week’s BioFestival agbiotech conference in Melbourne that there are still opportunities for companies to build new businesses in the food-testing field, using the latest DNA-testing technologies.

The German-born biotech entrepreneur is an honorary Aussie – he spent four years doing postdoctoral research into mammalian genome evolution at Melbourne’s La Trobe University between 1994 and 1997 before going home to Germany and evolving into a wunderkind of the European biotech industry.

After being appointed chief science officer of GeneScan in 1998, Toder established a strategic plan to market DNA microarrays, and medical diagnostics.

GeneScan debuted on Germany’s high-tech Neur Markt stock exchange in July 2000 with a valuation of €75 million, and surfed the tidal wave of anti-GM sentiment sweeping Europe, applying its microarrays to testing food and raw ingredients for the presence of GM transgenes.

GeneScan subsequently established subsidiaries in the US and Australia; Toder served as CEO of Melbourne-based GeneScan Australia between 1999 and 2001. GeneScan has subseqently become part of bioanalytical services group Eurofins, after a friendly takeover in 2003.

The catalyst for GeneScan’s success was Europe’s infamous “1 per cent solution”, the legislated maximum level of adventitious GM ‘contamination’ in food.

The limit has been criticised by scientists for being plucked out of thin air, instead of being based on scientific evidence of any health hazard, but Toder told BioFestival delegates that GeneScan took an apolitical stance - it was interested only in the business opportunity it presented.

“New markets are emerging. If you’re in the right place, and have the right tools, you can grow into them,” he said.

“Knowledge in biotech is still growing dramatically, so it’s a great source for searching for opportunities to start a business,” he said.

“The new knowledge can itself create new markets that are not occupied by other players.”

Toder said functional foods, including nutraceuticals, presented an opportunity , as did second-generation GM crops that would deliver real benefits to consumers.

Toder predicted that food and ingredient testing would increasingly employ DNA microarrays, rather than the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or antibody-based ELISA tests.

Microarrays offered the advantage of parallel processing – they could detect transgenes, but also allowed the particular GM crop cultivar to be identified from its unique combination of gene variants.

Before venturing into the business, companies needed to assess:

• where the market opportunity lay
• the potential clientele
• whether potential revenues were large enough to establish and grow a company
• whether revenues would be generated through services and/or products
• whether the technology was IP-protected
• the potential threat posed by me-too competitors