BioWorld International Correspondent

BRUSSELS, Belgium - EuropaBio, the European biotechnology industry association, has issued a call for the European Union to invest in research in sustainable industrial applications using "white biotechnology."

To coincide with the launch of the European Union's new four-year research program in Brussels last week, it said EU money should be put into creating centers of excellence bringing science, industry and services together to help transfer white biotechnology solutions to meet cross-sectoral environmental challenges.

EuropaBio claims that Europe is a world leader in white biotechnology applications such as laundry detergents or the production of penicillin and insulin. These are still small-scale applications, it said in a statement, but big sustainability breakthroughs will emerge with large-scale applications of the technology across the chemical and energy sectors, such as providing alternatives to oxidation processes However, EuropaBio said Europe is held back by a lack of research funds.

"The trend toward biotechnology will continue and accelerate; an estimate shows that in 2010 about 20 percent of the chemical market will be affected by biotechnology with a total value creation potential of about 1160 billion," said Steen Riisgaard, president and CEO of Novozymes A/S of Sweden, who also is chairman of the industrial biotechnology board at EuropaBio. "That has been enough to encourage the U.S. to spend 10 times more than the EU to learn how to copy nature and optimize our natural allies and invisible friends to make them suitable for industrial purposes."

EuropaBio claims that white biotechnology has potential to transform energy production and lead to more sustainable processes, using microorganisms such as molds, yeast or bacteria and enzymes as cell factories to make goods and services like antibiotics, vitamins, detergents and biofuels. It also has significant potential to reduce greenhouse gases and the use of fossil fuels and raw materials by offering cleaner and more sustainable industrial processes.

Parliament Wants One Biotech Commissioner

European Union management of biotechnology policy should be fundamentally revised, according to a European Parliament committee. "Major responsibility for coordinating the biotechnology strategy should be conferred on one commissioner in particular and on a single directorate-general created to that end so as to ensure greater consistency in EU activities," according to the Parliament's committee on industry, external trade and research.

The change is needed because EU policy formation is too fragmented, explained the Euro-MP who drafted the report, Elisa Maria Dami o of Portugal. Responsibility for biotechnology policy in Europe now is shared by five different commissioners and five different directorates-general (covering research, industry, agriculture, environment and ethics). The result is that overlapping and often conflicting recommendations emerge from the European Commission, even before the European Parliament and the EU's Council of Ministers start to discuss policy, a Parliament official involved in the development of the report said.

The committee's report, which will be discussed in the coming weeks by the European Parliament as a whole, even goes so far as to urge the launch of a "B-Europe" policy (emulating the "E-Europe" policy already adopted by the EU to develop a high-tech, information technologybased economy), which should "lay down the specific political agenda for the next few years in the field of biotechnology."

The proposals come out of the committee's assessment of the European Commission's own proposal for a "Life sciences and biotechnology strategy for Europe," released earlier this year.

Industry Fears Delays In Approval Process

The extensive review of drug registration rules now under discussion in the European Union could lead to increased congestion in the drug-approval process for biotechnology-derived medicines, European pharmaceutical executives fear.

The European Parliament in late October backed the European Commission proposals that all new medicines (and not just biotechnology-derived medicines) should be obliged to go through the EU's "centralized" registration procedure, via the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products in London.

The European drug industry had been arguing strenuously for continuation of the current choice, so that nonbiotech new medicines could still opt to go through the "mutual recognition" procedure, via national regulatory authorities. Part of the industry's argument is that the centralized procedures will get bogged down with too many applications if this change is adopted, thus impeding the registration of biotechnology-derived products.

The discussions continue in the EU's Council of Ministers, and a final decision is not expected until 2003.