Challenges of Biotech

IM will refer the excellent book "The Biotech Investor" by Tom Abate (Owl Books, 2003, New York) again. IM also tries to reserve his time to read it through, no matter it is a dense collection of biotech and marketing facts.

In the preface of this book Tom Abate says:

"Biotechnology is an experimental field. Only a handful of of biotech companies currently have products on the market. The vast majority of biotech firms run at a loss during long developmental cycles aimed at proving their founding thesis. Experiments take time, and they often fail. Even when experiments have been done, and their results analyzed and presented at scientific meetings, biotech medicines undergo an excruciating process of regulatory review the can lead to approval, rejection or demands for more testing...In biotech time, development horizons strech for years, even decades."

This is familiar for every modern biotech researchers. Dr. Abate refers medicine research but relatively similar problems may arise when a novel microbiological analyse method is the subject of the research. Approval is then depending not on the health of the customers but the potential markets (IM's opinion). IM still thinks that such a development task can be fulfilled in only years, but marketing may be a challenging task, indeed.

Contacts between paper industry personnel and biotech researchers shall be developed. There are other alternatives than the traditional fairs and exhibitions: discussions in Internet blogs, nings etc. would help significantly to present all modern microbiological tools and evaluate their use in paper industry microbiology. Unfortunately the main problem, time, still stays, even gets worser: people tend to be in a hurry in their working life today. To reserve a period, even short, to investigate new methods will still be worth to do!

Checkpoints of a paper machine.

Imagine yourself as a bacterium.

You are coming to the paper mill - maybe waterborne, maybe as a bug or as a spore in a lot of starch or mineral pigment.

What will happen to you?

Do you find an ecological niche inside the machine?

I am sure, you will find.

You will find a wet surface, some of your genes will be activated for the living inside a biofilm.

You have fellow bugs there. You could even communicate chemically.

And, after a period of lush life inside the biofilm, you get older and will be released into the water current.

And you wish, that there are no detectives, controlling your movements inside the paper machine: wet end systems, pulp and broke systems, mineral slurry and starch size routes...

The detectives belong to HACCP. They know where you will hide...

- This is my dream. Tools for this kind of HACCP are already available.