INTREXON CEO: CONSUMER MARKET IS KEY TO BIOTECH GROWTH

by Margie Manning

Biotechnology firms and business leaders need to think beyond health care if the industry is to grow, according to a leading entrepreneur.

The industry has underperformed since the first successful efforts to splice DNA 41 years ago, said Randal J. Kirk, chairman and CEO of Intrexon Corp., during a keynote speech at the annual gathering of BioFlorida in Tampa.

Biotechnology is a $170 billion industry, but that’s just two-tenths of 1 percent of gross world product, Kirk said.

About $130 billion of that is in therapeutics, about $30 billion is in agricultural biotech, $10 billion is in industrial biotech, while biotech for consumer uses is virtually zero. That’s in inverse proportion to the size of those industrial segments in the global economy, Kirk said.

“Biotech has a reverse footprint on the world. You should think beyond health care because if you want to know where the rapid growth in biotech is going to occur, it’s going to be, in my opinion, highest in consumer, second highest in industrial, third highest in agriculture and then therapeutics,” he said.

Biotech companies to date have generally concentrated on low-hanging fruit, Kirk said.

“There aren’t that many difficult problems you can solve with a single gene, yet that’s where therapeutics and ag bio have stayed almost exclusively,” he said.

He suggested biotech firms instead work on an industrial scale. “Living organisms do things so much more efficiently than chemical factories do.”

Intrexon (NYSE: XON), headquartered in Germantown, Md., operates in the synthetic biology field. Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that applies engineering principles to biological systems.

Intrexon raised $160 million in an initial public offering and went public in August, theWashington Business Journal reported.

Fuente: SmartBrief - Tampa Bay Business Journal

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