Singapore govt awards grant to Agenix subsidiary

A Singapore government decision to award a major grant to a subsidiary of Australian listed biotech Agenix is being labelled a "great vote of confidence" by Agenix CEO Don Home.

The grant from the Economic Development Board of Singapore will allow Agenix's 27 per cent owned subsidiary Phytoprotein Biotech Pte Ltd to continue the development of technology to produce recombinant proteins using plant cells as bioreactors.

The funds come on top of a recent equity injection of S$389,000 from Malaysian investment company CTV.

Unlike the CTV equity, which gave the Malaysian company 10 percent of PhytoProtein, the Singapore grant does not dilute existing shareholder value.

The grant allows PhytoProtein to recruit additional technical personnel for its Singapore operations and accelerates product development. It runs until the end of 2004 and covers manpower, equipment and other costs related to producing immunogenic proteins using plant cell-based expression systems.

Agenix initially invested in PhytoProtein in March last year as a vehicle for developing proteins for use in diagnostic kits for infectious diseases including malaria and dengue fever.

It is interested in the significant advantages in yield and safety offered by plant-derived proteins over existing systems such as mammalian cell lines or E. coli.

Proteins expressed by plants provide higher yields than mammalian cell line systems and, especially for more complex proteins, are more accurate than bacteria-based systems.

Besides providing further working capital, the grant from the commercially-savvy Singapore government adds credibility to the PhytoProtein technology, Home said.

The investment adds another strand to the web of joint biotech projects developing between Australian and Singaporean interests.

They include Rockeby Biomed, a biopharmaceutical company built on technology developed in Australia and backed by Singaporean investors. The company, which has developed a diagnostic kit for fungal infections, has announced it will list in Singapore, making it one of the first biotechs to appear on the city-state's stock exchange.