June 9 Visit to Dompe'

Dompe' is one of Italy's top Biotech companies and they have located a manufacturing, research and development and GMP production plant in L'Aquila. They sustained some damage during the earthquake but are back into full production. They facility is quite impressive and their technical expertise is in molecular biology, recombinant protein production by bacteria and yeasts, and production & purification protocalls development and optimization. Professor Rodolfo Ippoliti, of the L'Aquila Faculty of Biotechnologie hosted my tour and introduced me to Dr. Franck Martin, Contract Development Business Development Manager and Marcello Allegretti, Research and Development Director for Dompe'. We had a great visit and tour of this world class facility. They had interest in receiveing information on Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation at LSU, the LBTC at LSU and the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center and the Monsanto Biotech Incubator in St. Louis, which I told them about. I will send information and contacts to them when I return to Baton Rouge. They showed me their GMP facility, the lab scale fermentation and purification plants, the clinical grade production plant, the GMP protein characterization facility, and their clinical & toxicology support labs. Dr. Martin and Mr. Allegretti expressed interest in getting information on how they could convert several unused labs into a "bio-tech" incubator space that could accommodate university spin off bio-tech companies. I told them about the operations of the LBTC and the Emerging Technology Center and pull up their web sites for their review. I will send them policies and procedures on how they could organize that faciltiy and I will contact collegues at the Monsanto Facility to send supporting information. Professor Ippoliti was very interested in this concept and feels that there are some small start-ups that would take advantage of this situation. We will continue to communicate on this and I will assist them with information and documentation as needed. Attached are pictures of the facility that I took during the tour.