Americas Quarterly

innovations in the hemisphere

BUSINESS INNOVATOR Virginia Garretón Chile As Chile has become a grow- ing presence in the in- ternational market, high quality wine and salmon exports have become in- tegral to its global brand. So when Chilean salmon are found to have unhealthy amounts of antibiotics in their system or a Cabernet Sauvignon becomes bitter, it threatens to dam- age the market for some of the coun- try’s most important exports. Virginia Garretón, 40, a molecular biologist and CEO of Austral Biotech S. A., is at the vanguard of efforts in Chile’s emerging biotechnology in- dustry to develop technology that will help to maintain the profitabil- ity and high quality of these products and other food commodities. Garretón and her staff of nine researchers at Austral Biotech S. A., the

Santiago-based biotech research firm she founded in 2005 with private equity capital amounting to about

$1 million, are developing cost-effective methods to test for antibiotic levels in salmon and for a chemical that causes red wine to become bitter. The quick and inexpensive tests (Garretón compares them to at-home pregnancy tests) will allow producers to maximize profit by decreasing the time spent harvesting the salmon and, in the case of high-end wine, maintaining its taste and aroma.

The salmon kit,
which uses small
bio-magnets, helps
farmers identify the optimum time
to harvest their stock (when antibiot-
ics in the fish are at an acceptably low
level). Farmers are required to send
samples of their stock to labs to be
tested for antibiotics. Current methods
cost around $56 per test and take t wo
to five days of turn around. Austral Bio-
tech’s salmon kit will cost around $16
per salmon and is used on-site.
Another kit in the works measures
the quantity of the chemical 4-eth-
ylphenol, which, in high quantities,
makes red wine bitter.
“Identifying when the level is too
high can make the difference be-
tween a $50 bottle of wine or a $10
one,” Garretón says. Austral Biotech
is currently developing methods to
eliminate excess amounts of the
chemical detected by the tests.
Garretón’s innovations mirror
other advances in Chile’s biotech sec-
tor, which has grown by 30 percent in
the past three years, although she in-
sists the sector is lagging behind. She
hopes her company represents the be-
ginning of a more robust biotechnol-
ogy industry in the country.

“We need more companies in this field as well as advanced academic programs and professionals who can teach in them,” she says, “and I think we’re beginning to move toward that.”

With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from the Pontificia Universidad

Católica in her native Santiago, Garretón founded Austral Biotech S.A. shortly after completing her post-doctorate studies at Rockefeller University in New York, where she researched plant molecular biology.

The company is off to a promising start. It is currently

Virginia Garretón is the founder
and CEO of Austral Biotech.

let awarded the organization Chile’s Bicentenary Seal; and in 2008 the Peruvian Congress gave it special recognition for its assistance after an earthquake devastated much of the central coast region in August 2007.

Berríos credits the organization’s success and energy to the unique combination of the students who donate their time to effort and the beneficiaries they live and work with.

Recently, just after volunteers finished work on a new home in Cura-nilahue, 316 miles (509 kilometers) south of Santiago, Chile, the new owner rushed up to say thanks.

“This is the first time I won’t have to order my children to climb on their beds when it rains,” the woman, a mother of five, told the builders. “So they don’t get covered in mud.”