CBDMT Announces The Invisible Revolution: White Biotechnology
From the first recombinant protein in the 70s, modern biotechnology and more particularly the
industrial or white biotechnology is a real alternative technology for the development and the
production of goods from renewable resources (in 2015 up to €300 billion in chemical product
sales will be bioproduced). It will allow increasing energy and processing efficiency
(cost-effectiveness, flexibility, cleanness, sustainability). So please think not only about
pharmaceutical products when we are talking about the 'so trendy' biotechnology market. The
invisible white biotechnology revolution is going on.
Paris (PRWEB) February 24, 2008 -- The life science market is generally segmented in four segments:
Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals, Diagnostics and Medical Devices. A common problem is the confusion between
the biotechnology and pharmaceutical segments. Let us try to clarify a little bit the 'so trendy' biotechnology
market. In fact, there are two kinds of biotechnology: the traditional and the modern biotechnologies. The
traditional one is the fermentation mainly used in food and feed applications (Roquette, Danisco, Cargill,
ADM…). The modern biotechnology comes from the discovery of recombinant DNA molecules (Stan Cohen and
Herb Boyer in 1973), hybridoma technology (Cesar Milstein and Georges Kohler in 1974) and more particularly
the development of molecular biology since then.Let us go from the first biotech company to the invisible
revolution - the white or industrial biotechnology.
The first real modern biotechnology company: Genentech Inc.
Genentech Inc. was founded by Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson in 1976. One year after that, Allan Maxam
and Walter Gilbert co-founded Biogen Inc. The same year (1974) Genentech reported the expression of
somatostatin, the first human protein produced by a bacterium. In 1980, the first IPO, Genentech went public
October 14 at $35/share, raising $35 million. Within one day, the stock leaped to $89/share!