BIOTECH COMPANY READY TO LEAD PACK

The head of one of Saskatoon's pioneering biotech companies, Prairie
Plant Systems Inc. (PPS), says the company is ideally placed to be
among the leaders in growing pharmaceutical drugs in plants.

Company president Brent Zettl says PPS's experience during the past
six years growing medical marijuana for Health Canada in an
underground growth chamber in part of an old Flin Flon copper mine
has helped prepare his company for its next move into plant-based biopharmacy.

Zettl says the company has taken on a contract to grow a vaccine
antibody against hepatitis C within plants. The deal was struck with
the Saskatoon-based Vaccine Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO),
which is developing the vaccine.

"We have embarked upon a program to look at ways to have the plants
themselves manufacture this new hepatitis C vaccine," he said.

"If we enter the global stage with this one, it is going to take a
lot of time and money.

"It signals the beginning of a new era where plants can be designed
to produce protein-based medicines." It wasn't just Zettl touting a
big future for PPS on Friday, as the company marked the opening of a
new head offi ce and laboratory just east of Boychuk Drive on Highway 16.

The company has attracted an American expert to its board of
directors in Brandon Price, the former CEO of Cognate Therapeutics
Inc. and a vice-president with Cardinal Health, both companies that
are big players in the biopharmaceutical industry.

Price says the cost of building huge bio-fermentation tanks to
synthesize drugs on an industrial scale runs into the billions of dollars.

In just one growing class of molecules being tested by pharmaceutical
companies -- monoclonal antibodies, which are drugs that will be the
next weapon against diseases such as cancer and heart disease --
Price predicted 45 per cent of these drug therapies will instead be
produced by genetically inserting the antibodies into plants.

"Plants offer a very economic alternative and they are very
efficient," Price said. "Surprisingly enough, plants such as tobacco
plants or corn can make these very, very complex molecules as well as
humans can." Price predicts pharmaceutical companies that develop the
monoclonal antibody class of drug will contract out the production of
those molecules to companies that know how to grow such plants under
strictly controlled conditions. The value of such contracts in 10
years could grow to $1.26 billion US annually, he predicted.

Prairie Plants was founded by Zettl and two other partners 18 years
ago. Originally, the company was set up to clone saskatoon berry
plants to get a more consistent variety that could aid commercial
orchards in berry production.

The company is still involved in that work, but it has also created
an environmental division that serves companies such as Cameco Corp.
doing remediation work of mined-out landscapes by carefully
propagating northern plants.

The company has 38 employees in Saskatoon, Flin Flon and a small
underground growth chamber in Michigan.