The Hindu Business Line : An `event' that could be delayed

New Delhi May 18 The GEAC's decision on May 11 to commercially approve 49 Bt cotton hybrids based on existing events has been justified by the Supreme Court's ruling only May 8. The Court had held that GEAC could clear the release of new GM hybrids, so long as they expressed the already approved gene constructs: Bollgard I and II, Event-1 and GFM event.

What the GEAC has, however, simultaneously done is to also block largescale trials (LST) of a new event (`9124') developed by Metahelix Life Sciences Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based venture that has Kotak India Growth Fund and Nadathur Holdings & Investments as angel investors. The latter is an investment firm promoted by Mr N.S. Raghavan, a cofounder of Infosys.

Metahelix had sought LST and seed production approval for three Bt cotton hybrids (5174, 3134 and 5125) incorporating its own in-house synthetic cry1c gene construct. "It is a completely different gene with a different mode of action from cry1Ac or cry1Ab. It is a single gene with a broad spectrum of activity, producing toxic proteins against both bollworms and armyworm," said Dr K.K. Narayanan, Managing Director of Metahelix.

While that makes it similar to Monsanto's Bollgard-II, "ours is a single gene (cry1c), whereas they are using two (cry1Ac and cry1Ab)". Moreover, "the protein length in our event is half that of other events, which means the plant has to spend only half the energy to produce the same number of effective protein molecules," claimed Dr Narayanan, a former Monsanto employee.

Metahelix's event has gone through the stages of laboratory and green house-level validations, besides contained field evaluation and multi-locational trials. "Last year, we held field trials in 19 locations all over India and the results were endorsed by the Department of Biotechnology's Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation and the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee. Despite this, the GEAC has not approved our LSTs for this season," he said.

The company would then have to wait till next year for LST approval, which means the new event will not reach the farmer before kharif 2010. Not good news, if one believes Dr Narayanan that "our technology has been developed at one-fourth the cost of the existing ones".

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