A science and industry model that works

November 13, 2009

By Colleen MacPherson

The people involved in the university’s Feeds Innovation Institute (FII) are feeling quite proud of the 2009 ABEX Award that was presented recently to Bio-Extraction Inc. for best new Saskatchewan product. And rightly so.

Colleen Christensen, acting executive director of the FII, said the research, development and consulting service worked directly with Bio-Extraction on its award-winning protein isolate from canola “so this is a big deal for us. We supported the development of this canola meal through testing along the way. BioExx is currently producing and marketing animal feeds, and is working to produce canola isolates for human food in the future, which is an exciting prospect for us.”

It is all in a day’s work for the FII which continues the tradition of outreach to the feed industry by the College of Agriculture and Bioresources. Christensen explained the organization was established about three years ago “but is a reincarnation of what has existed since the 90s,” namely the university’s Feed Testing Lab, and later the Prairie Feed Resource Centre. The FII continues to operate “at the crops and livestock interface,” she said, but with more stakeholders, including government and industry, and with a two-part mandate.

The first is to make available to industry the university’s wealth of analytical labs, “to make good use of the university’s resources.” In those labs, the FII does fee-for-service work for companies like Bio-Extraction, short-term and very specific jobs such as chemical analysis and compilation of data needed for product registration.

The other half of the mandate, explained Christensen, is to build research networks that link to and support industry. Those networks include U of S researchers as well as outside partners who work “in the pursuit of discovery. To make a really good feed, you need nutritionists but you also need plant scientists, engineering, economics people. These networks are always set up on the premise of a multi-disciplinary mix of researchers and industry to explore the opportunities and issues of animal feeds.”

One success story is the Feed Opportunities from Biofuels Industries (FOBI) Network which connects more than 60 researchers across disciplines and institutions, including the Universities of Alberta and Calgary, with industrial partners in the bio-ethanol industry. Christensen said that in 2008, prior to the FOBI, researchers at the U of S brought in about $1 million in government funding for individual initiatives. “But bringing projects and researchers together resulted in about $6 million in awards from the federal government last year.”

For students in the college, the FII provides many unique opportunities, including contract work that can become a thesis project, for example. “And it isn’t very often students are truly talking to industry. They can see the direct link between their work and industry.”

On a larger scale, success stories like that of the FII and Bio-Extraction “mean diversification of the economy, the creation of jobs and diversifying canola into new product streams.

“There are many ways to get our science out into the real world. The FII is one of the models … and it’s working well.”