BBI Washington Writer

CARDIFF, Wales – Life science research is alive and well in Wales, the UK country located in western Britannia. From local strengths in the medical device and contract research sectors, to promising leads in genetics and stem cell therapies, Wales features numerous fortes.

“Bioscience is huge, with an average growth rate of 15% to 20% worldwide,” said Robert Wallis, bioscience sector manager of the Welsh Development Agency. “And it’s a pretty significant industry in Wales.”

Once home to powerful coal and steel sectors, this region of fewer than 3 million people is undergoing a transformation. Estimates indicate that about 15,000 of its residents are employed in the life sciences, with more than 250 companies making up its commercial base. Wales features numerous small outfits such as academic spin-outs and start-ups, alongside large multinationals in biotech, devices, diagnostics pharmaceuticals, agriculture and contract research.

The Welsh Development Agency, an economic enhancement entity based in this capital city, has been tapped by the Welsh Assembly Government to spur the region’s bioscience growth as Wales looks to push into a knowledge-based economy.

Its initiatives include forming new companies, expanding R&D at existing firms, securing government grants, setting up deals and recruiting foreign business and talent. Those tasks must be completed largely without major venture capital investors, as their funding is not traditionally widespread in Wales given its distance from the financing hubs of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

One company that effectively grew from within is Molecular Light Technology Research, which was born of chemiluminescent technology in 1988 and was acquired two years ago by a longtime licensee, Gen-Probe (San Diego).

Stuart Woodhead, one of the company’s founders and executive vice president of R&D, called Molecular Light’s rise “an incredible model for economic development in this region.” Its high sensitivity diagnostic tests use chemiluminescent labels as alternatives to radioisotopes, a technology licensed from the University of Wales College of Medicine. Long applied in clinical diagnostic tests, Molecular Light is expanding into industrial applications such as environmental monitoring.

Such an internal growth model also has worked for Tricotech, a diagnostics company that specializes in hair drug screening, and in 12 years of operation has developed an international client base.

Zoobiotic, a relatively small firm located just outside Cardiff, is building its business by employing what it calls the world’s smallest surgeons: maggots.

The new company, recently spun out of a trust of the UK’s National Health Service, represents a public-private partnership that remains owned in part by that government health agency and other backers. In total, they invested 1.7 million ($3 million) in ZooBiotic, established in May after a decade of R&D work demonstrating the flesh-eating maggots’ ability to treat troublesome wounds such as diabetic ulcers and pressure sores.

“They get into all the nooks and crannies that conventional dressings can’t reach,” explained Steve Thomas, the company’s technical director, noting that the maggots can increase their weight 20 to 30 times over the course of a two- to three-day treatment. “They’re remarkably effective at removing dead tissue.”

The idea hardly is new – less-refined maggot therapies date back several centuries. But ZooBiotic nonetheless expects its LarvE product to outperform potentially competing maggots being developed in the U.S., Germany and Israel.

Its “biosurgeons” – classified as drug therapy in Europe as opposed to the FDA’s device designation – come from the Lucilia sericata fly and are sterilized during their egg stage by an undisclosed chemical process. In treatment sessions, pots of about 300 maggots are applied in “free range” fashion on an open wound to digest dead tissue and facilitate bacterial removal while simultaneously producing antimicrobial and healing effects.

Even before Zoobiotic was created, its maggot therapy had been building a client base. To date, about 15 million maggots have been sold to physicians for prescription use under a limited “specials” license from UK regulators. The company is targeting full licensure, positioning it to gobble up a major share of the European market.

For the National Health Service, its investment in the technology could result in an indirect financial reward. While the company expects to turn its first profits in the next year or two, Thomas noted that the maggots are expected to reduce treatment costs and hospital stays and even combat the growing problem of MRSA.

“This is just taking advantage of maggots doing what maggots do,” he said.

The region’s bioscience anchors include ConvaTec, part of Bristol-Myers Squibb (Princeton, New Jersey); GE Healthcare, a $15 billion unit of General Electric formerly operated as Amersham; Euro/DPC, part of Diagnostic Products Corp. (Los Angeles); Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, part of Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, New Jersey); and Biomet UK, a unit of Biomet (Warsaw, Indiana).

Of course, many of these business opportunities stem from successful academic research. In a notable unification last year, the University of Wales College of Medicine merged with Cardiff University to create one of the UK’s largest research universities. Other major Welsh universities with accompanying bioscience clusters are found in Bangor, Aberystwyth and Swansea.

These days, Cardiff University is a major stakeholder in the Wales Gene Park, a venture created to combine Wales-based genetics, life sciences and clinical expertise. Its primary research is focused on oncology and neuroscience, according to director Nick Lench, and both areas have generated commercial partnerships since its 2002 inception.

The Wales Gene Park has out-licensed some of its colon cancer genetic discoveries to Myriad Genetics (Salt Lake City), and it has developed relationships to provide Alzheimer’s disease clinical data to GlaxoSmithKline (London) and Celera Genomics Group (Rockville, Maryland). Related research efforts include cancer registries and a clinical first, embryonic stem cell transplants into Huntington’s disease patients.

“Expertise exists in Cardiff and Wales,” Lench said. “It’s a matter of bringing them together.”