In an effort to address the needs of the Island’s growing biotechnology industry, the BioFoodTech facilities in Charlottetown has invested nearly $1 million in new equipment.
The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) provided a non-repayable contribution of $500,000 to the P.E.I. BioAlliance toward the purchase of the equipment.
Additional funding of $100,000 was provided by the province through an Innovation P.E.I. grant as well as a repayable contribution of $337,822.
Rory Francis, executive director of the P.E.I. BioAlliance, said for the non-pharmaceutical industries, the Island didn’t have the proper equipment to allow companies to scale up its products from bench scale (or laboratory scale) to commercial quantities.
Francis, along with other partners, was on hand for the announcement at BioFoodTech in Charlottetown recently.
The new equipment includes a fermentation unit (built by Island company, DME), a centrifuge, an osmosis unit and a spray drying system.
Francis said there aren’t many places in Canada, or in North America, that have the capabilities in terms of equipment and brainpower the Island now has, calling this step of increasing manufacturing capabilities “very vital”.
“Fermentation is a platform technology important to many companies who are developing new products in natural health products, in food and in animal health products,” he said. “Fermentation is a core technology and we are really pleased at how that can actually be here in P.E.I.”
One company that will make use of the new equipment is MicroSintesis Inc., a Canadian-based life sciences company that came to the Island in June 2016 that created a platform of novel anti-infectives from probiotics.
Jonathon Roepke, lead product development research scientist for MicroSintesis,
said one product in development is a low-risk product that is a combination of probiotics and proteobiotics (which are the active components that are produced by probiotic bacteria) and is used for dogs with diarrhea.
“This announcement has allowed us to produce products for commercial launches.”
Francis said as companies come to the Island and continue to grow and launch new products, they will hire more people, which leads to high quality, high paying jobs on the Island.
Investing in such infrastructure is important, he said.
“It’s how you grow the bioscience sector, and grow the economy on P.E.I. We make these relatively small investments and it sets the stage for a big return on investment,” he said. “It’s another magnetic pull to P.E.I. for companies who need this kind of space and this kind of infrastructure.”
