Getting to the meat of biotechnology

Growing up with -- and later working for -- a father who owned a local plant that processed as many as 120 cattle a day and 2,000 hogs a week, Skip Wrape knows the value of meat.

But Wrape's latest venture into meat processing is taking a decidedly less traditional, but increasingly valuable, approach.

Wrape recently launched a new company in Cape Girardeau, River City Biologicals Inc., a biological raw material supplier and processor of meat products. The business, which employs about four people for now, is operating at 813 Southern Expressway.

"It's biological work, but it's more blood and guts," Wrape said last week. "I'm the very bottom of the rung of biotechnology."

Wrape's new business provides organic material to the bio-tech industry, providing processed meat products to multi-million dollar companies like Becton Dickinson and Co. in Chicago and Sigma-Aldridge Corp. in St. Louis. Sigma-Aldridge, for example, converts the meat products into chemicals to supply to research labs.

After getting started in the field with two other biological firms in Tyler, Texas, Wrape returned to Cape Girardeau in August to be near his family. It wasn't long before he bought the facility on Southern Expressway.

The nondescript little building held some sentimental value for Wrape. It had been the building out of which his father operated Central Foods from 1964 until 1981. As a young man, Wrape went to work for his father as a sales assistant and in other capacities before leaving town to work in other fields.

Wrape bought the building from Cauble & Field, the wholesale grocery warehouse which had been using the building's huge freezer for years. He knew it would be a good site for a third biological company.

He brought in hydroflaking machines, which are capable of breaking down 40- to 60-pound blocks of frozen meat, such as beef pancreas, pork hearts and livers and beef hearts and livers. The machines are capable of shaving the frozen meat, creating small wood-chip like slivers.

The secret is that the meat doesn't have to be thawed to cut. Heat kills the enzymes, proteins and hormones that the biological companies want to extract from the meat. Companies process the flakes, removing those enzymes, proteins and hormones to make organic chemicals.

Life science and high technology companies like Sigma-Aldrich -- and others throughout the Midwest -- contract the work to be done at River City Biologicals. Then they create biochemical and organic chemical products for use in scientific and genomic research, biotechnology and pharmaceutical development.

At River City Biologicals, Wrape also has eight centrifuges that extract serum from cow, pig and goat blood. Wrape calls the process spinning, but centrifuges are mechanical devices that use centrifugal or rotational forces to separate serum, the clear liquid which separates from the blood when it is allowed to clot.

Such serums are also used for research purposes, in diagnostic tests and in cosmetic and pharmaceutical products including vaccine production. Wrape freezes the serum for sale to these companies, who then sell it for research to make pharmaceuticals.

Wrape's conservative estimate is that by this summer, he'll be selling a half-million pounds of hydro-flaked meat. It's harder to guess how much serum he'll sell, but he's hoping it's a lot.

In some parts of the country, animal-rights activists protest using animals for this purpose, but Wrape doesn't expect to get such resistance here. He is buying his meat already slaughtered for sale.

"If I wasn't here, the animals would be slaughtered anyway," he said.

Such innovative businesses are becoming more popular, said Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce president John Mehner.

"This is so interesting and fascinating," Mehner said. "This is the kind of venture we like to see. It's innovative."

Mehner said such businesses are a vital cog in the wheel of biotechnology and the ever-expanding field of life science. Simply put, biotechnology is the use of living things to make products. In this case, the products are being used to make medicines, in part.

"That's the whole deal," Mehner said. "This is a business that is sort of treading new ground. We love to see businesses like this here."

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137