The Center for Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology will be operational on RTI’s campus in Research Triangle Park in about two months. Initially, about 15 researchers will work at the center. Construction of a greenhouse, measuring 3,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet, is planned, with room for expansions.

Within a year, the number of researchers working for the center is projected to double to 30 and Lelie plans to establish a computational biology group.

The center will target research that deals with beneficial microorganisms that help clean up persistent contamination and digest municipal or animal wastes into biofuels, as well as with harmful microorganisms, such as bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses. The center also wants to work on making crop plants more drought resistant and produce better tasting. And it will look into domesticating medicinal plants, so natural resources can be protected.

Lelie expects the work to come from government research contracts and collaborations with industry. He has good chances of finding potential research and business partners in or near RTP. North Carolina’s Research Triangle is a hub for agricultural biotechnology. Companies such as Bayer CropScience, Syngenta and BASF CropScience have operations here. (More about agricultural biotech in the RTP area here.)

Lelie talked to Science in the Triangle about setting up the center and getting started:

Click here to view the embedded video.

An array using high-concentration photovoltaics from Semprius, Inc.

A year or so ago, Joseph Carr found himself on an elevator with a man wearing a Siemens polo shirt. Having once worked for a division of Siemens, Carr introduced himself as the CEO of Semprius, Inc., a company that makes very high-efficiency solar modules. At the end of a fourteen-floor ascent, the two men exchanged business cards. Within months, Semprius and Siemens announced a joint development agreement.

Yes, a true “elevator pitch” success story.

The Siemens joint venture was just one highlight in a busy year for Semprius, which also received federal stimulus funding from the Department of Energy to commercialize its product and in October was named one of 25 North Carolina Companies to Watch.

I knew when I arranged to interview Carr that Semprius made solar photovoltaic panels, but I wasn’t sure what made the Semprius product different from the Japanese-made modules we installed on our roof in Durham about five years ago. Carr brought me up to date with a fascinating and lucid explanation of the world of high-concentration photovoltaics.

To begin with, the entire surface of your typical domestic rooftop panel is some sort of semiconductor—most likely silicone, or possibly cadmium telluride, Carr said. Sunlight hits the surface and creates electricity that is routed to inverters for use in the house or on the grid.

This is different from high-concentration photovoltaics, in which lenses or mirrors concentrate the sunlight onto smaller bits of semiconductor beneath the optics.

Most high-concentration systems, Carr explained, involve semiconductors of just one square centimeter covered by lenses that are nine to ten inches square, which magnify the sunlight 500 to 600 times. But Semprius, Carr said, creates semiconductors that are about the size of a dot you’d make with a ballpoint pen, so the lenses that cover them need only be about three-quarters of an inch per side. These little lenses concentrate the light 1100 times. “In other words, we’re putting 1100 suns onto our semiconductors,” Carr told me.

Traditional photovoltaic panels vs. high-concentration models in which lenses focus the sunlight on smaller semiconductors. Illustration courtesy of Semprius, Inc.

Semprius panels achieve additional efficiency because the design of the lens allows 96 percent optical throughput and because the tiny semiconductors don’t heat up the way even one-square-centimeter cells would. This means no thermal management is required in the system, and cells that run cool last longer.

This is all made possible with “micro-transfer printing technology.” First, a foundry “grows” semiconductors to the company’s specifications on a special substrate material. For the next step, Carr suggested that I imagine not a roller printing press but instead something that more resembles a Gutenberg press or even a rubber stamp that lifts hundreds or even thousands of the tiny semiconductors from the substrate and then “prints” or stamps them down onto electronics-grade ceramic. This step is done at Semprius headquarters near Research Triangle Park.

Once the active layer is lifted, the substrate can be reused, further reducing costs. (Typically, the substrate is shipped as part of the semiconductor.)

This technology, which is licensed from the University of Illinois, could be used in a wide range of applications, including computer and television displays or solid state lighting. In fact, when Semprius was formed (the name stands for semiconductor printing), the principals had not yet decided which application to target. They decided on solar only after evaluating a number of other product applications, and they are looking to license out the technology for those other uses.

While the core microprinting technology is fully automated, Carr told me, the company is still hand-assembling the modules. The federal stimulus money is to help scale up manufacturing so that the company can “contribute to the energy needs of the country,” he said.

Although these solar panels are way more efficient than the ones we installed on our house, high-concentration solar technology is not intended for domestic rooftop use. That’s because the lenses that concentrate the sunlight must follow the sun. The arrays are on the ground on trackers, mechanical devices that follow the sun throughout the day and the seasons. The development deal with Siemens is to deploy that company’s control mechanisms to predict where the sun will be with great accuracy.

Joseph Carr, CEO of Semprius, Inc.

Semprius solar technology is already being tested by several utility companies, by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, by Sandia National Laboratories, and in a handful of European locations. Carr said that there is a huge interest in this sort of technology in developing countries, where microgrids using Semprius arrays could bring clean electricity to locations not currently served by utilities.

“We’re going to make a very big difference in the world,” he said.

Dr. Robert Koger

Dr. Robert Koger is president and executive director of Advanced Energy, a nonprofit organization established by the North Carolina Utilities Commission in 1980 to forestall electrical rate increases by promoting energy conservation and alternative and renewable sources of electricity. Advanced Energy provides services that focus on energy efficiency for commercial and industrial markets, electric motors and drives, plug-in transportation, and applied building science.

Advanced Energy also operates NC GreenPower, a program funded through consumers’ voluntary contributions, designed to increase the amount of renewable energy put on the electric grid in North Carolina and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

This month, Dr. Koger assumes the chairmanship of Triangle Area Research Directors Council (TARDC), a group of science and technology leaders from local companies, nonprofits, and universities. The group meets over lunch monthly from September to May, to exchange ideas and information and to hear from guest speakers. TARDC’s first meeting under Dr. Koger’s leadership will be September 21, and the guest speaker will be Mr. Joe Freddoso, president and CEO of MCNC/NC STEM. Non-members of TARDC can attend the luncheons.

I recently asked Dr. Koger about the history of Advanced Energy and about his leadership of TARDC.

You were chairing the North Carolina Utilities Commission when it launched Advanced Energy as a nonprofit. What factors went into that decision?

During the 1970s and early 1980s, North Carolina was experiencing phenomenal growth in electric energy demand resulting from both population growth and greater energy use–particularly with homes and businesses installing air conditioning on a very wide-scale basis. Depending on your age, you may remember that very few homes had air conditioning in the 1950s and 1960s. I know my wife and I bought our first house in 1970 and installed air conditioning in it. It had been built in the 1940s.

As a consequence, North Carolina electric utilities (who had not had any rate increase cases for many, many years) started filing yearly large rate increase applications to support the construction of new generating plants and transmission lines needed to serve the growing electrical load (growth in electricity demand was averaging 10 to 12% a year). We would have hundreds and hundreds of people turn out at the public hearings held across the state to oppose the increases.

In the fall of 1979, I was returning from one such hearing in Reidsville that ended at about midnight. Several protestors had suggested placing more emphasis on renewable generation. Also, at that time, little was being done by utilities anywhere to assist their customers with any kind of energy efficiency practices. It occurred to me that we might dampen the need for new generation by looking at ways to conserve energy and also look at alternative ways to generate some of our power requirements. Hence, I thought we might want to propose the establishment of a non-profit corporation that all the state’s utilities (through a tiny surcharge on their customers) could contribute to in order to explore such opportunities. Having one such entity would avoid unnecessary duplication of effort that might result from asking each utility to explore these issues on its own.

My fellow commissioners supported the idea, and we established a hearing on the concept for the first week in January of 1980. Soon after the order was issued, Governor Hunt called me and said that he wanted to testify at the hearing in favor of the concept. In the two months prior to the hearing, I met with several groups at the Governor’s request, to explain the concept.

The Commission approved the concept after public hearings and receiving almost unanimous support for it, and the Alternative Energy Corp. was formed. The name was changed in 1997 to avoid confusion with our overall purpose. I think this was the first or maybe the second so-called “public benefit” fund formed within the U.S. Now a number of states have them.

Photo: Advanced Energy

Advanced Energy works as a global consultant for energy efficiency. Was it originally envisioned in that way or was the original mission to work within North Carolina?

Our original thought was that it would work only in North Carolina, and it remained that way for about the first 10 years. It was mainly a grant-giving organization during those years, with some projects being carried on by the staff.

I resigned from the Commission and assumed the leadership of Advanced Energy after the Corporation was about nine years old, when the first director left for a position in Oak Ridge.

The company had done a lot of good things and had gotten a good bit of favorable publicity for all that it had done. However, I thought we could do more by having more expertise on staff as opposed to trying to find outside contractors most of the time. So we made the transition, including establishing major laboratories to do testing and training.

Soon we were getting requests for assistance from entities in other states. The Commission approved our expanding beyond North Carolina. One reason was that we were able to expand our internal capabilities by hiring more experts, which then allowed us better resources to train younger workers that we were hiring. All this taken together meant that we could do more for our North Carolina utilities and their customers.

What are the most exciting developments Advanced Energy is pursuing?

Advanced Energy's Plug-In Hybrid Electric School Bus Media Event in Raleigh on May 17, 2007

That’s a very difficult question because we are involved in so many cutting-edge projects. We are heavily involved in the technical aspects of electric cars (plug-ins and all-electric), testing and locating charging stations, etc. In terms of electric motors, which use a huge amount of our overall energy, we have the only independent electric and drive motor test facility in North American and do a lot of testing of motors that are shipped into this country. We have done some testing of  “hub” motors that could theoretically be used to transform existing cars into “plug-ins.” We have also assisted other countries in setting up testing labs–most recently, South Korea.

We are working closely with the Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We are collaborating with the DOE and National Renewable Energy Laboratory on the preparation of the national standards for retrofits for houses by bringing together experts from around the country. For EPA, we are preparing the training manuals for their new Energy Star housing requirements taking effect in 2012.

Tell me about NC GreenPower.

We operate NC GreenPower as a separate company. We initiated this non-profit in 2002 at the request of the Utilities Commission, following a request from a legislative committee. I think NCGP has done a lot to lay the groundwork for more renewable generation in North Carolina, particularly, in terms of showing that renewables could be safely added to the grid.

You are assuming the leadership of TARDC this year. What has that organization meant to you?

I have been a member for several years. I am reminded of Claude McKinney’s comment (he was the designer and director of NCSU’s Centennial Campus) that “education is a contact sport.” He wanted the campus to be a place for research to be done by both industry and the university and he made sure that we were in “contact” by location of the building and by the formation of partnerships. And his vision is being carried on today.

I think TARDC serves some of the same purposes. It brings together people and helps all of us know what is going on in the Triangle and how we might benefit in some way from that knowledge.

For more information on participating in TARDC, please contact Cara Rousseau at tardc@rtp.org or 919.549.8181.

Biofuel crops on a roadside near Raleigh. Photo: NCDOT

Sherrod heads NCDOT’s Roadside Environmental Unit, which is charged with keeping the state’s medians and roadsides safe and aesthetically pleasing. The unit is responsible for mowing, stormwater and erosion control, and the 25-year-old wildflower program. While many states have similar wildflower plantings, only two—North Carolina and Utah—have begun exploiting the potential of roadsides as a source of fuel.

The roadside biofuel project aims to answer two questions: whether it is feasible to grow biofuel crops on the state’s roadsides, where soil tends to be poor and compacted, and whether it is feasible to do so cost-effectively. Already, the first question has been answered. This year, Dr. Matthew Veal of N.C. State University extracted more than 100 gallons of canola oil from plants grown on four one-acre pilot sites across the state. This was mixed with conventional diesel to create what is known as B20, a blend of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent conventional. Sherrod says that this mixture is used because diesel engines do not have to be modified in order to use it.

Canola being harvested from a pilot plot in June 2010. Photo: NCDOT

Canola seeds ready for extraction into biodiesel. Photo: NCDOT

Whether biofuel can be produced cost-effectively is the more challenging question. The initial pilot project was designed to test different subclimates and tillage regimes. But Sherrod says that farming small, disparately located plots is about as efficient as running to four different supermarkets across a county to shop the sales. They are now looking to scale up with larger plots that will allow them to farm more efficiently; at that point they can compare certain fixed costs. “We know what it costs to mow a mile,” he says. Now they would like to know what it costs to till, plant, and harvest a mile of crops.

As Sherrod points out, one way or another, large machines are going to be servicing these roadsides. “Our objective,” he says, “is for dollars of mowing to be reallocated to energy.” The same amount of money might be spent, but it would produce a tangible benefit in the form of biodiesel.

Knowing that corn-based ethanol has gotten a bit of a black eye in the renewable energy community in recent years, I asked Veal to talk me through the difference between ethanol and biodiesel. One argument against ethanol is characterized as “food versus fuel”: ethanol production would take large amounts of acreage currently used for food crops. The roadside biofuel program, though, would be using marginal lands, not North Carolina’s rich agricultural fields. (As an aside, Veal suggests that a largescale roadside biofuel program might also provide jobs for farmers.)

Another problem with ethanol is that of embedded energy—the amount of fuel that is used to plant, vertilize, harvest, and distill the product. Veal says that creating biodiesel is less energy-intensive than creating ethanol, because rather than using heat for distillation, the final product is created through a chemical reaction that requires less input of energy.

Canola oil being extracted from seeds. A simple chemical process will transform it into biodiesel that will be used in the NC Department of Transportation fleet. Photo: NCDOT

He uses a screw press to extract oil from the seeds once they are harvested, then mixes in some chemicals. In 24 hours, the oil has separated into biodiesel and glycerin that is reserved for other uses. Because heat is not used to create the product, very little energy is expended in its manufacture, compared to ethanol.

Veal brought the roadside biofuel idea to Sherrod after learning about Utah’s endeavor in a workshop. It has both state and federal funding and feeds into North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate. Surprisingly, other states are not so far following suit. “We’ve left all the other states in the dust,” says Sherrod.

More information on North Carolina’s roadside biodiesel project will be presented Thursday at a workshop sponsored by Triangle J Council of Governments at RTP Headquarters.

RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded about $1 billion – about $271 million from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $5.6 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

I first saw Phaedra Boinodiris speak as the opening speaker at TEDxRTP (my review) back in March, but this was a different kind of talk, geared more towards scientists and science communicators.

I remember playing Pong when it first came out. I remember spending many hours back in 1980 or so playing The Hobbit on Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And I played many games at arcades (still not knowing which games started out as arcade games adapted to computers and which the other way round). Then I quit playing games for a couple of decades until my kids were ready for them. I loved Zoombinis – an amazing game of logic and a brilliant preparation for taking IQ tests! I loved Richard Scarry’s Busytown – the one and only game I know about infrastructure, where players build stuff and deliver it to others for the good of the town – from baking bread to paving roads – learning along the way how those things are done.

And sure, Phaedra Boinodiris started with a slide depicting Pong (to the chuckle of the audience) but soon got into the real stuff – the serious gaming and the story of how she got involved in developing such games, as well as about studies of gaming and how different kinds of games help develop different real-work skills, from eye-hand coordination to leadership to cooperation. Her first game – INNOV8 – was developed as a prototype, a proof of concept, in only three months and instantly became a huge hit. It is used by businesses and business schools around the world to teach Business Process Management. It is essentially a first person shooter game (without guns) in which the player is brought as an outside consultant into a company where s/he has to figure out the flow, the bottlenecks, etc. (including by interviewing employees, as well as data-sheets) and experiment in making it more efficient. The 2.0 version came soon after, adding such problems as traffic, customer service and supply chains.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The next game, recently announced and coming out in October 2010, will be a Sim-City-like serious game CityOne, designed to help city planners, town councils, citizens, and engineers plan better, more efficient infrastructure for their cities. Put in your city’s specs and start building new infrastructure, see how much it will cost, see what problems will arise, see what solutions are available – probably something you could not have thought of yourself and may be surprised.

As I am currently reading ‘On The Grid’ it occured to me that the developers of CityOne should read that book, and that Scott Huler should be given a test-run of the game, perhaps for him to review for Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News&Observer and the local NPR station. And for Science In The Triangle, of course.

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

NCSU's EcoCAR

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.

The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.

On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities.

Ali Seyam, student team leader

“We lost so many nights together,” said Ali Seyam, one of three graduate student leaders on the NCSU team. To get the car ready, team members sacrificed spring break, he said, and worked until 6 a.m. Saturday.

The EcoCAR Challenge is a three-year competition that was established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center for science and engineering near Chicago, manages the competition.

Teams spent the first year designing the technology to build their EcoCAR. The second year was dedicated to rebuilding a GM-donated Saturn View. Following a week of tests in the Arizona desert and three days of presentations in San Diego, Calif., students then optimize and promote their entries during the third year.

The lithium-ion battery pack

At the end of the competition, which is broken down into multiple milestones and deadlines, teams with the best scores in the different categories can win hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But not just the winners benefit. Participating students interact with mentors in the industry and learn cutting-edge skills. Sponsorships and donations to complete an entry, including the car, parts and software, are worth more than $1 million per team, Terry Gilbert, the faculty advisor for the NCSU EcoCAR team, estimated.

Once the competition is over, the NCSU EcoCAR will become part of the university’s pool of vehicles.

More information about the NCSU EcoCAR team is here and here.

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.

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