Features

Winner of SA BIO Plan 2008 aiming to spearhead an emerging industry

By Asha Speckman and Thabiso Nkone

The winner of the inaugural SA Bio Plan Business Plan Competition is... GreenPharm! Accompanied by rousing applause Dr.Rachel Chikwamba, GreenPharm's Project Leader and principal researcher, and the rest of the GreenPharm team received a prize money of R100 000 from the Minister of Science and Technology Mr. Mosibudi Mangena and in addition an opportunity to receive a R15 million investment from the Innovation Fund.

For Dr Chikwamba, winning the SA Bio Plan 2008's Business Plan Competition marked another notch in a journey that began with a five year South African and European Union Pharmaplanta project. The Pharmaplanta project focused on the creation of transgenic plants that express important pharmaceuticals for human health. It is “the knowledge gained during that five year period that empowered us to undertake the GreenPharm project” says Dr. Chikwamba.

With rabies killing about 50 000 people, mainly in Africa and Asia, every year and even more animals; GreenPharm — a start up emanating from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR) Biotechnology section—  sought to develop a cheap and effective post exposure prophylaxis. The result, Rabivir™

Rabivir™ is regarded as a new generation rabies prophylaxis. While the rabies immune globulin (RIG) currently used in post—exposure prophylaxis treatment is sourced from human or equine blood plasma, GreenPharm's alternative Rabivir™ is produced in plants, more specifically tobacco leaves. Adding to the novelty of this technology is the fact that it can be further exploited as a platform for production of other complex therapeutic proteins such as HIV antibodies at a competitive price and in a plug—and—play manner.

“Once we had ran tests and assured ourselves of the soundness of the Rabivir™ treatment we decided to test our boundaries by stepping beyond the familiar confines of our laboratory and scientific research and explore the possibility of developing our technology into a viable business. This we did by entering the SA Bio Plan Executive Education and Business Plan Competition” says Dr Ereck Chakauya  GreenPharm project manager.

This “joint initiative of the Innovation Fund and Emory University came at the right time as we were ready to make the move to business. Being scientists we all had very little knowledge of the business world. So, moving from a scientific and technical mindset to that of business was like turning the Titanic. Fortunately, SA Bio Plan has an executive education programme which proved to be an eye—opener” continued Dr. Chakauya.

“To make this Titanic shift and then win, considering the impressive projects that were presented by other teams, was truly amazing. For us the SA Bio Plan completion provided a totally different way of looking at our project. The perspective of venture capitalists and how to identify an idea that could lead to big business was refreshing. Our idea is a lot bigger in scope than we initially imagined; the insights in how to interact with people who will potentially fund you were helpful. In future we will definitely change the way we sell any of our scientific outputs,” says Dr. Chikwamba.

Both Chikwamba and Chakauya admit that more challenging than drafting the business plan was carrying favour with the judges — a panel comprising experienced international venture capitalists. “In the advice they gave us they mentioned that venture capitalists requires you to be on the ball at all times and that the first five minutes of your presentation to a prospective investor are crucial. The most important thing is that your idea must be scientifically and commercially sound. You don't need a perfect business plan, remember someone can always be hired to perfect it at a later stage,” reveals Dr. Chikwamba.

The GreenPharm team intends to invest the prize money back into their idea with the aim of “developing a process to extract rabies antibodies from tobacco leaves that is compliant to Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) regulations. cGMP conditions are essential for the production of antibodies that will go into early phase of safety testing. We will, therefore, be modifying the existing cGMP plant material processing infrastructure and we'll also invest in human capacity building in cGMP production” says Dr. Chikwamba.

Going forward GreenPharm plans to spearhead an emerging industry of plant made monoclonal antibodies with Rabivir™ as the front runner product in its planned pipeline of plant made pharmaceuticals.

SA Bio Plan 2009 is now open. The closing date for applications to participate in the Business Plan Competition is 27 March 2009. Form more information and forms visit
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