Biofuels and what else?
The public, investors and certainly the biotech industry are fully aware of biofuels, but what else is out there in industrial biotech? BIO scheduled a panel this morning -- it drew more than 200 people, by my estimate -- to discuss just that.
There's a lot, actually. There's the bioplastics market, for one -- Cargill is a leader there. (Producing bioplastics also would cut down on U.S. consumption of petroleum by reducing production of petroplastics, by the way.) There's syngas, and there's also butanol, which as a coating and solvent alone addresses a $3.3B market, although it has an upside of potential use as a biofuel.
As Philippe Guinot, vice president of business development at Metabolic Explorer pointed out at the panel, the chemical applications of industrial biotech address a market as large as ethanol. All of which helped his firm go public earlier this year, raising about €52 million (US$70 million) on Euronext. You can view the press release on the IPO here.
The question is how to get the word out? Without Bush mentioning bioplastics or syngas in a State of the Union address, the public hears industrial biotech and thinks just biofuels.
