Corn-Based Duds: Future of Chic

Ready to drive a biodegradable car and wear an Armani suit made of corn?

It’s just around the corner, say industrial biotechnology insiders. The emerging field promises to change the way consumer products are made, using the same genomic tools employed in medical and agricultural biotechnology. New product development will be based on plants and enzymes, and a new "bio-based economy" shall spring forth, bearing the fruits of lower production costs, less pollution and richer farmers.

By Steve Mollman Wired.com

McKinsey & Co. estimates the field will be worth more than $100 billion by 2010, but not everyone is ready to invest in it.

"The problem with this technology is that it’s just technology," said an investor who declined to give his name at a recent meeting held by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Asked if he’d been burned by tech investments in the past few years, he scoffed. "Burned? Try incinerated."

Facing this mood, companies presenting at the event focused on real-world applications and case studies.

In the making of vitamin B2, for example, Germany’s Hoffman-La Roche replaced a multi-step chemical process with a one-step biological solution that cut both costs and emissions roughly in half.

Danish company Novozymes passed around a packet of baking mix containing new enzymes that keep the bread fresher longer and promise to lower costs for the baking industry and increase the shelf life of its products.

Cargill Dow handed out T-shirts made from a corn-derived biopolymer called PLA. Giorgio Armani will make clothing based on PLA, which can also be converted into biodegradable plastic. Electronics makers like Sony and Fujitsu intend to use PLA for portable music players, laptops and other products. Toyota is considering it for a biodegradable car.

Brent Erickson, a vice president at Bio, played up the technology’s environmental benefits. "Even Europeans are enthusiastic about the green applications of industrial biotech," he said, drawing chortles.

But the government needs to set more specific environmental targets, which manufacturers could then turn to industrial biotechnology to achieve, said John Ranieri, vice president of biobased materials at DuPont.

For their part, investors were most concerned about profitability.

While Cargill Dow is rapidly lining up partners for PLA, for example, it still needs to show a return on its enormous development investment of $750 million.

Given the capital needed and the weak investment climate, many agreed that companies must cooperate. Networking is key, said Ranieri.

Case in point: DuPont had known about a superior polymer called Sorona for 50 years, but production costs made it uncompetitive. Working with a venture called Genencor, it found a microorganism that produces Sorona’s basic building block. The biobased solution cost two to three times less than making it at traditional chemical facilities.

Industrial biotech got a boost from government recently, when the Department of Agriculture announced a task force to consider a national institute that would focus on, among other things, industrial biotech applications.

"It’s politically popular on both sides of the aisle in Congress," said Bio’s Erickson, "because growing a bio-economy could bring new jobs and investment for rural America, while reducing our dependence on petroleum."

Still, investors are twitchy, and the heat is on to show profits — particularly for small ventures.

An interesting thing about those corn-based T-shirts: They’re good at wicking sweat from the body. In the current investment environment, that could make them very popular.

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