Two Canadian Tech Breakthroughs: Nanotubes and GM Plants Point R&D in New Directions

From two recent articles in The Globe and Mail, it appears that Canadian applied research is alive and well and on the threshold of moving to production in two key sectors: basic materials manufacture and health science. After years of work, a joint team from the University of Sherbrooke and the National Research Council (NRC) Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences says it has created a large-scale production method for constructing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNs) with striking properties. SWCN-based material is a single-atom sheet of carbon with a strength 100 times that of steel but with only one-sixth the weight of steel. Production is said to have been achieved at a rate of two grams per minute, with a cost of less than $10 a gram. The NRC team predicts that mainstream products using SWCN could be available as early as the spring of 2007. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, a Calgary-based biotech company claims to have produced commercial quantities of human insulin from GM-modified safflower plants, a move that could rival the discovery of insulin by Canadians Banting and Best in 1921. Inserting a human insulin gene into a safflower plant has led to the recovery of human insulin as the plant grows. By the end of 2006, the company, SemBioSys Genetics Inc, expects to demonstrate that the end-product works as well as conventional insulin in controlling blood glucose levels, setting the stage for human clinical testing to begin by the end of 2007. The prediction is that the new process will reduce capital costs in insulin manufacture by 70% and product costs by 40%. For the article on nanotube manufacture, see: http://makeashorterlink.com/?C6AE21E7D For the article on GM-modified insulin production, visit: http://makeashorterlink.com/?H3BE15E7D Summary by: The Editor