BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - The final dismemberment of PPL Therapeutics plc began Tuesday, when the company put its laboratory and farming machinery up for auction after failing to find a buyer to take on the business in its entirety.

The lots on offer formed the contents of PPL's pilot plant, including equipment for isolating and extracting proteins, and their sale brings to an end PPL's 16-year effort to commercialize technology for producing human proteins from the milk of transgenic animals. The company is close to completing the sale of its farm and headquarters building near Edinburgh, and next month its drug development and embryo research equipment also will fall under the hammer.

PPL was forced to put itself on the market in September after failing to convince enough investors of plans to restructure around its fibrin-1 surgical sealant technology. The need to restructure followed the decision in June by partner Bayer Healthcare LLC not to proceed with development of PPL's lead product, alpha-1-antitrypsin (AAT).

The company is most famous for its association with Dolly, the cloned sheep, and at the height of Dollymania was valued at £500 million (US$866.5 million). The current valuation is far shy of that, at about £5.5 million, while as of Aug. 31, PPL had £9.3 million cash.

PPL was set up in 1987 to commercialize transgenic technology from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996, the year of Dolly's birth. The company's first transgenic sheep, Tracey, was born in 1991. Dolly was not transgenic, but her birth was followed by the first cloned transgenic sheep in 1997, and cloned transgenic pigs in 2001.

But by then the shine was wearing off, and PPL spent most of 2001 trying to raise money for an AAT manufacturing plant. It finally succeeded in pulling in £32 million in November 2001.

Then in March 2002, clinical development of AAT was put on hold, and PPL subsequently announced it was abandoning plans to spend £42 million on the AAT manufacturing plant because it was too risky.

In the meantime, on Feb. 14, 2003, Dolly was euthanized after vets at the Roslin Institute found she was suffering from a progressive lung disease. She now is on display in the National Museum of Scotland, alongside her cloned predecessor Morag, born at Roslin a year earlier from an embryo-derived cell.