Commercializing Biotechnology

U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. Commercializing Biotechnology—An International Analysis. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983. 

A. E. Humphrey. "Commercializing Biotechnology Challenge to the Chemical Engineer." Chem. Eng. Prog., 80 (12), December 1984, 7. 

ApoCom is a commercial biotechnology company focused specifically on serving customers in the field of computational biology and environmental risk analysis. It was founded in November 1993. In 1994, ApoCom obtained a license from Oak Ridge... 

Some typical commercial biotechnology products are citric acid, semi-synthetic penicillins and cephalosporins, and vitamin B12. World production volumes and bulk prices show a considerable range of values. Prices tend to be inversely proportional to the amount of product sold, that is, the scale of production, and to the concentration at which it can be produced in the bioreactor. The importance of the concentration at which each product is produced in determining the cost of purification and isolation, and thus the... 

Financial appraisal techniques are a vitally important aspect of commercial biotechnology, but it is often very difficult to gather authentic data to illustrate the... 

Congress of the United States, Commercial Biotechnology An International Analysis, p. 589. Washington, DC Office of Technology Assessment, 1984. 

Walter Gilbert (1932- ) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Cambridge University in 1957. He then joined the faculty at Harvard University as professor of physics, but bis research interests soon shifted to biochemistry. While still carrying out his academic work at Harvard, he founded Biogen, one of the earliest commercial biotechnology companies. He received the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of DNA sequencing methods. 

Due to its inability to monitor activities in the commercial biotechnology or aroma field, the University licensor may not be satisfied with an undertaking by the licensee to "use best efforts" in commercializing products embodying the licensed invention. As with any other licensor, a university will be interested in deriving maximum income from a patent license arrangement. However, because it has no means at its disposal for monitoring commercial market activities, a university... 

Studies, such as the one by Frolik and coworkers, which examine the effect and optimization of variables in HPLC of proteins, can be expected to contribute to the implementation of this type ofprotein resolution technique into future commercial biotechnology processes. 

Another new technology that offers promise for commercial biotechnology purifications is the use of parametric pumping with cyclic variations of pH and electric field. This has been described by Hollein and cowork-ers.fi26) They worked with human hemoglobin and human serum albumin protein mixtures on a CM-Sepharose cation exchanger. The extensive equations they reported for parametric separations allow analysis of other systems of two or more proteins which may be candidates for this type of separation. 

Since then, the number of new drugs based on biotechnological production methods has increased dramatically, as has the number of companies in the biotechnology sector. While only a few start-ups populated the commercial biotechnology scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the end of the century most major pharmaceutical companies had moved into the area and the worldwide number of biotech companies had grown to several thousand ... 

Commercial biotechnology today exhibits many strengths, but the near-term developmental prospects are fragile. Our success will depend on the sustained efforts of many dedicated people of diverse backgrounds who will address themselves to the resolution of climatic as well as scientific and marketing issues. 

BBC-Research (2007) http //www. marketresearch.com/BCC-Research-v374/Separation-Systems-Commercial-Biotechnology-1477810/, viewed Sept 2011. 

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