AQUABOUNTY'S AQUADVANTAGE SALMON - A PROLONGED JOURNEY TO MARKET: HOW INNOVATION WAS IMPEDED BY ACTIVISTS AND MEDIA FEAR-MONGERING

In 1989, a transgenic Atlantic salmon was developed using recombinant DNA technology by a research team working at Memorial University of Newfoundland.  The transgene enabled the salmon to grow year-round and thus to achieve market size in half the time of conventional Atlantic salmon.  A Company was formed to bring this innovation to market.  In 1995, the Company submitted its application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seeking approval to market the salmon for human consumption.  Twenty years after the application was submitted, the FDA has yet to make its decision.  Compare this to the FDA submission by Eli Lilly & Co. in May 1982 for Humulin, a form of human insulin produced by microbes created using recombinant DNA technology.  That application took less than 6 months to be approved in October 1982 and has been used by diabetics for over 32 years with no adverse effects on human health.

The journey of AquaBounty's innovative salmon from research bench to market acceptance has become a case study in the strategic use of misinformation, pressure tactics, media manipulation, and political interference to block the use of a technology with far-reaching applications in food production, and in human and animal health and medicine, and environmental protection and remediation, to name but a few.  The resources spent on combatting the many coordinated activist campaigns to effectively kill the Company's application to the FDA have been crippling for a small firm of only 21 people that faced bankruptcy twice in its history.  Having to cut staff and curtail its R&D activities to focus on survival is something that most aquaculture entrepreneurs have experienced at one time or another.  However, the extreme degree of opposition to AquaBounty is out of all proportion to its innovative product, and to the technology used to achieve what can only be called "precision breeding".   because of the addition of a single gene to the more than 34,000 genes in the Atlantic salmon genome.

This presentation will discuss the journey from concept to market of AquaBounty's AquAdvantage Salmon and what being a real pioneer in this industry is all about.