Biotechnology industry maturation

All things considered, it is fair to state confidently that, over the past two decades, biotechnology has matured and has entrenched itself as an integral part of pharmaceutical discovery and development. The results seen in the first two decades of biotechnology demonstrate the power of the technology, and the current rapid pace of developments predicts many new and heretofore unimaginable applications. These developments will have an impact on the practice of medicine and on the pharmaceutical industry in presently unpredictable but exciting ways which will carry well into the twenty-first century and after. 

The Health Sector (Food, Agriculture, and Pharmacy industries) has received the greatest impact of biotechnologies both, social and economical. Therefore, the chemical applications of biology to this sector have deeply contributed to that consolidation, leading the development of biotechnologies to a mature state. A list of biotechnological companies, exclusively associated to the Food and Pharmacy industries is included in Table 1. Those companies are not analyzed in this book and are only included for completeness purposes and to prevent the oil reader of useless search. 

Maturation of the petro-chemical industry, environmental pressures for "clean chemistry" and the explosive development of biotechnology have increased interest in the application of enzymatic processes to organic synthesis. Enzymatic processes play an increasing role in the generation of chiral pharmaceutical intermediates, water-soluble materials and biopolymers. One problem in the development of enzymatic reactions for organic synthesis is the prediction of the stereochemistry of reaction. Reliable models for prediction of stereochemistry are needed to broaden the application of enzymes to organic synthesis. 

There are some good reasons that trade secret protection is inappropriate here. The first is practical. Most of the developers of innovations in this biotechnology are basically highly-trained academic people who have not been sufficiently brainwashed to keep their mouths shut. This may partially disappear as this industry progresses to a more mature( ) self-aggrandizing( ) member of the commercial community. 

Of the various pharmaceuticals derived from plants, the Cinchona alkaloids are probably, by volume the largest market, with an estimated production of 300-500 metric tons a year of pure quinine (32) and quinidine (33). These alkaloids are extracted from the bark of Cinchona trees, which require about 10 years to mature before harvesting. Furthermore most of the plantations are in areas not easily accessible, often threatened by infections with Phytophthora cinnamomi. This leads to many uncertainties in planning of the production, and as a result alternative sources for the alkaloids are of interest. Various synthetic aproaches have been used (552) but are not of industrial interest. Therefore, interest in biotechnological approaches is large. Patents related to the production of quinoline alkaloids by means of plant cell cultures are summarized in Table XXVIII. 

Therefore, the technological challenge is large, particularly in the case of particle mixtures with near similar physical properties such as size and size distribution, density and morphology. Then, differences in surface chemistry can be exploited to separate the particles,for instance via flotation [33],L-L interfacial partitioning [34-36], foam and gas aphrons (stabilised micro-bubbles) fractionation, and electrophoretic and electrostatic techniques. This whole field, despite its maturity in other industries such as metallurgy and solid waste fractionation, is totally imderdeveloped for fine-chemical and biotechnological production methods. 

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