Enzymes get cheaper and better

After 10 years of work, Novozymes announced it can make enzymes that brings down the production costs of  cellulosic ethanol to below $2 per gallon. The enzymes, called Cellic CTech2, have shown to work in corn cobs and stalks, wheat straw and woodchips.

All commercially available fuel ethanol is made by turning the starches in corn kernels into sugar. The goal has long been to switch from corn, which is also a food source, to biomass waste such as corn stalks and woodchips. But the cost of the enzymes that break down the cellulose in biomass to sugar has always been too high for cellulosic ethanol to compete with gasoline and corn ethanol at the pump.

Novozymes is a Danish enzyme producer with a large production plant at its U.S. headquarters in Franklinton, north of Research Triangle Park. Part of the research to bring down the cost for Cellic CTech2 was done in Franklinton, but marketing director Poul Anderson told Transport & Logistic News that the enzymes will be produced at Novozymes’ proposed Nebraska facility.

Horizant raises safety concerns

An experimental restless leg treatment that GlaxoSmithKline, a British drugmaker that has its U.S. headquarters in RTP, developed with a California partner fell short of regulatory approval because of safety concerns.

The Food and Drug Administration raised questions about pancreatic tumor cells in rats that were found in preclinical tests of the drug, which goes by the name Horizant and is a longer-lasting version of an epilepsy drug that is already on the market. The epilepsy drug was approved despite having raised similar safety questions, because the seriousness of the condition it treated justified the risk.

A Jeffries analyst estimated that Horizant could have generated up to $500 million in annual sales.

Hamner establishes ties to Norway

The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, an RTP research institute, set up a second partnership to help biotech companies overseas speed up their drug development.

A few months ago, the Hamner established ties to China, now a link to Oslo, Norway, and one of the leading European clusters to develop cancer treatments followed.

As part of the emerging international network, the Hamner will provide the Norwegians access to three comprehensive cancer centers located in North Carolina, the Shanghai Center for Disease Control, and Tianjin Institute for Hematology. Training and education will include post-doctoral training in innovative drug safety technologies, business training for entering the U.S. market, and regulatory training for compliance with FDA standards. Oslo will contribute its research and Phase I resources and potential access to its own growing European network of collaborators.

Government funding for research is up sharply from five years ago, so are concerns about global warming.

Temperatures are rising most everywhere around the globe. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also up, a hallmark of more than two centuries of industrialization.

More carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere today than in the past one million years, according to measurements taken from columns of South Pole ice. Sea levels are rising, because the sea ice at the North Pole is melting. The Arctic ice cap shrunk about 25 percent from 1979 to 2005, satellite photos show.

Robert Jackson

By the end of the century, carbon dioxide amounts are projected to double. That could raise ocean levels 1½ feet, enough to put most of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and stretches of the state’s coastal areas under water.

“We’re heading into territory the Earth hasn’t seen in millions of years,” said Robert Jackson, director of the Duke University Center of Climate Change. (Photo at left)

It’s a prospect that gives researchers looking for alternative energy sources pause, because climate change is first and foremost thought of as an energy issue.

The notion of exploring the sun, the wind, water, geothermal heat and plants as energy sources takes on new meaning when the purpose of the research shifts from trying to preserve the status quo to trying to ensure survival.

“We may be entering territory that is unexplored,” said Carl Bauer, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Carl Bauer

Jackson and Bauer made their statements during the RTI Fellows Symposium, a two-day event built around scientific challenges in need of attention. The symposium, which attracted about 400 researchers, was held Monday and Tuesday at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center in Chapel Hill.

Global warming and what role biofuels will play in the energy supply were two of the scientific challenges addressed at the symposium. (More on personalized medicine, another scientific challenge discussed at the symposium, here.)

Alternatives to oil and coal are nothing new. Geothermal heat made hot spring spas possible thousands of years ago. Windmills pumped water into irrigation canals and milled grain for centuries. Ethanol powered some of the first cars more than 100 years ago. Nuclear power plants started sprouting in the U.S. and Europe in the late 1950s.

None of the energy sources are ideal. But fossil fuels have a lot going for them. They pack a big bang for the buck and are fairly easy to store and transport across the globe.

Bauer projected that by 2030 the energy demand will increase by about 11 percent in the U.S. and by about 45 percent worldwide. With fossil fuels providing much of that energy, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions would go up by about 45 percent.

David Dayton

Biofuels are more expensive than gasoline and less energy dense, but they are a good option to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, said David Dayton, director of chemistry and biomass program manager at RTI International in Research Triangle Park.

Dayton was part of a panel of experts at the RTI symposium Tuesday who talked about biofuels. Also on the panel were Bauer, Steven Burke, chief executive of the Biofuels Center of North Carolina, and Rakesh Agrawal, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Ethanol made from corn produces on average 19 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline. If the feedstock is biomass, such as agricultural residue, forest waste and switch grass, the reduction can exceed 80 percent.

Rakesh Agrawal

There’s just one problem: Not enough land to supply the entire U.S. transportation sector with ethanol fermented from the cellulose in biomass, said Agrawal.

By 2022, ethanol production is projected at 36 billion gallons, less than a fourth of the amount of fuel the U.S. is projected to need for transportation.

So the U.S. Department of Energy, which pays for much of the research, is no longer focused on fermentation technologies to produce ethanol. Rather, the DoE is shifting to a broader strategy and spreading out funding among technologies, Dayton said.

That’s a good thing. In the case of alternative energy sources, Bauer said, “one size doesn’t fit all.

North Carolina, for example, focuses on biodiesel and ethanol from corn and biomass to meet an ambitious goal: By 2017, 10 percent of liquid fuels sold in the state should be locally grown and produced.

Steven Burke

The first corn ethanol plant is scheduled to go online in January in Hoke County, said Burke of the biofuels center.

Fourteen biomass feedstocks have been planted at research sites and private farms statewide and North Carolina’s 18 million acres of forest are expected to contribute wood waste for ethanol production.

The state also has a partnership with RTI to produce ethanol in other ways than fermentation. Outside of that partnership, RTI recently was awarded a federally funded contract to work on a process that turns biomass into a type of bio oil, which can be mixed and refined with petroleum.

The state’s 10 percent goal is a tall order, Burke acknowledged. It will require an increase of biofuels production from 2 million gallons in 2008 to 600 million gallons in 2017.

He’s counting on music to gain support and boost demand for biofuels. The biofuels center signed up 19 artists, who agreed to have their fan Web sites linked to the center’s site. All artists are featured on a CD called “From Bluegrass to Switchgrass.”

Burke called it music “for a state obsessed with fast-driving NASCAR.”

Testing Tysabri’s risks

The scientist who was instrumental in developing Tysabri has come up with a test to identify patients at risk of getting a potentially deadly brain infection known as progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML.

Since 2005, Tysabri has been linked to 23 PML cases worldwide, that’s about 1 in 400 patients who received the drug. Four patients have died.

Elan, an Irish company that developed the drug, and Boston-based Biogen Idec, which makes it at its Research Triangle Park plant, maintain PML is rare. But patients and investors are getting worried – particularly after it became known recently that the caseload in Europe is much higher than initially thought.

Only eight of the PML cases occurred in the U.S., where doctors must follow strict guidelines of who may get Tysabri and regulators closely monitor adverse event reports for the drug. Most of the 16 cases reported in Europe were in Germany, where regulatory oversight was less strict.

Elan projects Tysabri sales of about $1 billion this year. But more patients could get the drug if a test became available to sort out those at risk of developing PML.

GSK’s need for a new Advair

GlaxoSmithKline will advance efforts to develop a next-generation treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, but the British drugmaker stopped short of updating patients and investors about its next-generation asthma treatment.

GSK’s Advair is currently the top seller to treat asthma and COPD. But Advair, which generated about $8 billion in sales last year, could get competition from cheaper generic copycats starting next year. GSK, which has its U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, fills the Advair disk at its RTP-area plant in Zebulon.

A next-generation Advair is in the works. GSK has a partnership with Theravance, a Bay Area drug development company, to develop a once-daily treatment that is a combination of a new long-acting beta agonist and a corticosteroid GSK already uses in another product.

On Tuesday, GSK said both partners “remain committed to the progression of the … program for the treatment of asthma. ” But for now, the new combination treatment will only go on to late-stage testing in COPD.

In other company news:

• Aldagen made its second attempt in two years to raise $80.5 million in an initial public offering of stock. The Durham biotech company filed for an IPO in May 2008 and withdrew its filing five months later.
• Metabolon, a Durham biotech company, completed a $12.3 million fund raiser. One of the investors in the round is Syngenta, a Swiss agricultural products company that has its research center for genetically modified crop seeds in RTP. Metabolon, which identifies biochemical biomarkers associated with disease and medicines, already had a partnership with Syngenta.

Oil from sticks and grasses

The RTP area is already a hot spot for biofuels research. Researchers, economists and economic developers at universities, companies and government organizations have been working on efficient ways to make ethanol from biomass such as wood chips, corn stover and switch grass.

Now, researchers at RTI International in RTP have received a $3.1 million contract from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a one-step process that turns biomass in a type of bio crude. The biomass “oil” is an effort at finding a replacement for petroleum, the world’s most important source of energy since the 1950s.