The Innovation Place Bio Processing Centre has played a key role in the development of several well known natural health products. They just can’t tell you which ones.
Confidentiality is the name of the game when you are a third party manufacturer in a field where patent protection is not always an option. “In order to get a patent on a new technology you’ve got to disclose that technology and once it’s disclosed it’s pretty easy to reverse engineer the process and find a way to get around it,” says Gregg Willie, Executive Director of the Bio Processing Centre.
Willie says the level of confidentiality demanded by a client depends on the nature of the company and the nature of the process. “Because we only offer aqueous and alcohol extraction processes, some companies don’t want their competitors to ever know they are using our facilities as that would disclose more than they want about their technology, so we can’t even use the client’s name.”
Since plants themselves cannot be patented, the extraction and processing of the active ingredients of a particular plant become trade secrets. The intellectual property around the process is the only real thing of value some companies have, according to Art Hesje, President and CEO of Fytokem Products, Inc., an Innovation Place based company which has developed international markets for two locally produced plant extracts. “We’ve spent four to five million dollars in development and in the end we don’t have products, we have lab books and we have processes.”
For all clients, big or small, the Bio Processing Centre offers facilities and equipment with the clients themselves providing the intellectual horsepower. Bio Processing Centre staff provide guidance based only on general process techniques or specifics about the equipment. They will not discuss things they’ve learned from working with other clients. “We sometimes have to pause and declare a potential conflict where we just tell our clients they are heading down a road we know somebody had already gone down and we can’t offer any suggestions or assistance,” says Willie. “They then need to be very specific in their instructions so they can have free access to the intellectual property coming out of their work in those areas.”
Hesje says he’s confident his company’s intellectual property secrets are being safeguarded. “Because the Bio Processing Centre hasn’t got any of its own products or its own processes to protect, the customer doesn’t have any concern they are going to steal a piece of it.”
Willie says being a production facility, with no in-house research, helps to distinguish the Bio Processing Centre from its competitors. “We have to be very careful because our reputation for confidentiality helps to set us apart and is part of our inherent value.”
