A genetically enhanced AquAdvantage salmon (rear) next to an ordinary Atlantic salmon of the same age/AquaBounty photo

Financial collapse kills AquaBounty salmon plans

Score one for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

AquaBounty Technologies – the Massachusetts-based company that claimed to have found “a better way to feed the world” with a genetically modified, faster-growing salmon – has gone bust.

Always a faithful booster of Alaska’s commercial fishing industry, which saw genetically engineered (GE) fish yet another threat in market that has been running away from Alaska for a couple decades, Murkowski had branded the company’s salmon “Frankenfish” and spent years trying to get the federal government to ban it.

She never succeeded in the regulatory arena, but victory appears to now have come thanks to in part to the public relations war she waged.

Five years ago, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it had deactivated a 2016 import alert that prevented GE salmon from entering the U.S. and given AquaBounty the OK to import it AquAdvantage “to the company’s contained grow-out facility in Indiana to be raised into salmon for food.

“As was determined during the FDA’s 2015 review, this fish is safe to eat, the genetic construct added to the fish’s genome is safe for the animal, and the manufacturer’s claim that it reaches a growth marker important to the aquaculture industry more rapidly than its non-GE farm-raised Atlantic salmon counterpart is confirmed.”

But with Murkowski and some environmental organizations continuing to publicly rant about the company’s Frankenfish being dangerous, AquaBounty struggled to find the cash to complete its planned Ohio farm where the AquaAdvantage salmon were to be raised in a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS).

Selling assets

Struggling financially, the company sold its existing, Albany, Ind., RAS farm to Superior Fresh for $9.5 million this summer. A Wisconsin-based business, Superior Fresh runs a combined salmon and aquaponics farm that uses salmon waste from the RAS operation to fertilizer salad greens grown in greenhouses.

The greens, the company claims, effectively clean the water used to fertilize them, and it can then be recirculated thorugh the fish tanks. The company has publicly stated its opposition to genetic engineering, and on its website positions its salmon as the world’s healthiest:

“Our fish eat a non-GMO (genetically modified organism), organic diet, and are not fed like most farmed fish, which are too often fed with formaldehyde, pesticides, antibiotics, and GMOs.”

After the sale of Indiana farm, AquaBounty tried to make a go of its AquaAdvantage salmon at its remaining farm in Bay Fortune, Prince Edward Island, Canada, but earlier this week announced “the company will wind down its hatchery operations in Bay Fortune, including a reduction of its workforce and the exit of several senior management members.”

In that statement, AquaBounty’s new chief financial officer (CFO) and interim chief executive officer, David Frank, said the company is continuing to seek financing for the planned Ohio farm that never got off the ground and will “continue to market and sell available assets to generate cash.”

The company’s situation, however, sounds grim. Frank described what was going on at Bay Fortune as a “wind down,” but it sounded more like a going out of business operation.

The plan there, as announced, included “the culling of all remaining fish and a reduction of substantially all personnel over the course of the next several weeks. We prioritized maintaining operations at the Bay Fortune facility, but do not have sufficient liquidity to continue to do so. We have been working for over a year to raise capital, including the sale of our farms and equipment.

“Unfortunately, these efforts have not generated enough cash to maintain our operating facilities. We therefore have no alternative but to close down our remaining farm operations and reduce our staff.

“Dave Melbourne, our Chief Executive Officer, has voluntarily resigned his position with the Company, effective December 6, 2024. Additionally, Alejandro Rojas and Melissa Daley, our Chief Operating Officer and Chief People Officer, respectively, have departed with the elimination of their positions.”

The company does still hold one potentially valuable asset, the patent it holds on the genetically engineered salmon it created in 1989 by injecting a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon along with a “promoter sequence’ from an antifreeze protein gene from the ocean pout into fertilized Atlantic salmon eggs.

The salmon that hatched from those eggs grew at a greatly accelerated rate. The result, according to an article in Fish Farming Expert magazine was an Atlantic salmon that grows to a market size of 4 to 5 kilograms (8.8 to 11 pounds) “from eyed-egg stage in 16 to 20 months compared to 28 to 32 months for conventionally farmed Atlantic salmon.

“Now more salmon can be produced in less time to meet the growing demand of an increasing population seeking a safe and healthy protein source.”

Resurrection?

It is conceivable that AquaBounty could sell or license its patented AquaAdvantage technology to another salmon farming business to put Frankenfish back in the swim. In that regard it is worth nothing that technological break throughs are hard to keep contained.

Legal and funding problems similar to those that have plagued AquaBounty stalled the development of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the U.S. in the 1970s with the end results being that the breakthrough that proved IVF possible came in England instead in 1978 with the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test tube” baby.

A history of IVF published in the journal Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online in 2016 records a long and difficult history that started after a pair of U.S. doctors showed it was possible to fertilize a human egg in a test tube in 1944.

Time magazine – one of the country’s most powerful news organizations at the time – labeled that discovery a “scientific affront to womanhood,” according to that history, bu Time’s “framing, probably one of many even then, would not maintain its domination. Once IVF became a clinical possibility, the media focused more on fears of monsters and religious objections than on a masculinist scientific mastery of nature, and by the time the sector was well developed, into the 21st century, nature would become as much an ally as a victim of assisted reproductive technology with, for example, IVF coming to be seen as a means of restoring ‘natural’ reproductive function.”

In a world where the human population continues to grow at a rapid rate along with the demand for quality protein, it’s not hard to imagine the Frankenfish finning down a similar trail as IVF on its way from a status as a “monster” to a new position as a cheaper, and thus better, way to provide Omega 3 loaded protein for the masses.

One has to wonder if it couldn’t someday rise from the dead as did the fictional character for which it was named.