When you think of tobacco in North Carolina, you think of the state’s biggest cash crop, growing it, harvesting it, and ultimately taking it to market. A Tuesday announcement at Research Triangle Park may do its part to change some of that perception…”you’ve made the right choice, and you won’t regret it.”
State officials welcomed Medicago, Inc. to North Carolina; it’s a vaccine maker that has a unique approach in it’s production, it uses plant-based manufacturing technology to create the medicines it produces. Medicago President and CEO Andy Sheldon says that’s where tobacco comes in…”basically what we do is grow the tobacco plants in the greenhouse. We then program the tobacco plant to grow vaccine, once that process is done, we end up incubating the plants for about five days after we’ve put in the genetic sequences that are involved, and after five days we harvest and then we extract our protein of choice, and then we purify that protein, and basically that process takes about a month.”
Lieutenant Governor, Walter Dalton says it couldn’t be a better fit for our state…”the beauty is that it involves in this process a traditional product of North Carolina; tobacco, which is part of our number one business sector, the agribusiness sector, and it marries that with the number one growth sector; the biotech industry.”
And according to Sheldon the vaccine route isn’t the only route his company can take with this…”one of those uses could be something like biofuels, programming plants to make enzymes, which can be useful inn breaking down waste material that waste material can be used to make sugars, which would replace corn, in fact.”
About 14 months, that is what Andy Sheldon says it will take to get the facility and the staff in place, and that is when Sheldon says, you will see what this company can do…”produce about 10 million doses per month, what that translates to about 120 million doses per year of pandemic vaccine, or 40 million doses of seasonal flu, once one does the mathematics.”
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