Biotech for bees
One Miami startup hopes to cure a mysterious plague threatening the food supply.
(Fortune Small Business) -- Bee colonies might not seem like the most lucrative market for designer drugs. But the need is urgent: CCD, or colony collapse disorder, a strange syndrome that kills adult worker bees outside the hive, has been reported across the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says American beekeepers lost 37% of their hives to CCD last year, after losing 31% the year before.
Scientists still can't agree on which virus, if any, causes CCD. The government estimates that a third of our food supply - $15 billion annually in vegetables, nuts and fruits from plants that depend on bees for pollination - could be in danger.
Enter Beeologics, a Miami biotech startup that aims to create vaccines for all viruses that could lead to CCD. It's an unlikely collaboration between Eyal Ben-Chanoch, 49, a tech entrepreneur who helped design the first Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) Pentium chip, and Ilan Sela, 71, an Israeli expert on sequencing the genomes of bee viruses.
The pair saw a crisis no other company was responding to and gathered 10 top researchers to work on a cure.
"There hasn't been a lot of support for bee health," says Ben-Chanoch. "Our mission is to fill that void." The company's first proprietary vaccine, Remebee, is in trials with six beekeepers. (Poking insects with syringes is tricky, so the drug is added to a sucrose solution used to feed bees.)
FDA approval is still pending, but the company is confident it will be able to commercialize the vaccine this summer, at around $2 per dose. A hive will need one dose per month. Multiply that by the nation's 2.5 million remaining hives, and Beeologics could soon be buzzing with revenues.
Jeff Pettis, head of the USDA's Bee Research Laboratory, is cautiously enthusiastic about Remebee's potential. CCD likely stems from multiple factors, he says, some of which have yet to be discovered. But with time running out before the food chain is affected, any cure is worth trying.
"We live in a land of milk and honey," says Pettis, "but the honey can no longer be taken for granted." 
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