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TransAlgae Products

TA-fGH® - TransAlgae Fish Growth Hormone, for improving fish vitality and reducing growing costs

Market Overview: There is an increasing world demand for food, as both population and standards of living increase, yet available land crops are inadequate to meet the need for more animal-derived protein. Fish are the most efficient known feed converters of feed to animal protein. The 130 million ton/year (and growing) market for fish is unable to meet the rising demand of the global population since there is a natural limit to captured fish, and excess fishing has reduced the catch.  Hence, aquaculture production is filling   the   gap (see   graph   below, source:  http://www.aquaculture.ca/files/opportunity- expansion.php) but growing fish in aquaculture farms is an expensive endeavor, and the initial stages of growth are the most costly per unit of weight.  Administering  fish  growth  hormone  (fGH)  to  fish  can considerably shorten the time to market and reduce feed intake  and  capital  costs  during  the  fish  initial  growth phase. This growth acceleration will also enable the aquaculture industry to meet the growing market demand for fish at a lower price.

Competition: So far there have been three ways to obtain fish with high fGH levels:   

A) Breed the fish to produce high levels of the hormone.  This could take 30-50 years of intensive breeding, for each species, as has been done with chickens.
B) Weekly injection of purified growth hormone to the fish. But, the purified GH costs more per gram than gold and weekly injection of millions of hatchlings is impractical and not cost effective.  
C)  Transgenically modifying each fish species to produce more hormone. This has been difficult to commercialize (even in the USA) due to regulatory constraints and speculation in regard to the safety of the modifications to natural fish ecology and human consumption.

The TransAlgae Solution:  TransAlgae  believes that if the growth hormone  is  made  in  algae  and  specifically targeted to specific locations within the cell, and the algae fed to fish, the fish will grow faster, but the fish themselves are not transgenic.  The quantity and timing of the application of TA-fGH® can be modulated to

meet regulatory concerns in various jurisdictions.  The first applications will be for the use of TA-fGH®  at

hatcheries, which are closed systems.   The marketing of TA-fGH®  to fish hatcheries will be both for the ornamental and edible fish markets, where the hormone is known to vastly increase the survival of hatchlings, and considerably shorten the time before release to ponds while increasing their rate of growth.  TransAlgae estimates that the annual global market of fish growth hormone is at least $3 billion, and that one ton of TA-fGH® supplement can save growers between $700K and $5 million in growth related costs.