Living Cell yesterday confirmed it will soon consider a commercial package, brokered by economic development agency Venture Southland, to help it build another pig-rearing unit in Southland.
Living Cell medical director Prof Bob Elliott said the company needed to build a second rearing facility as it geared-up to meet demand in its clinical trials of a potential cure for diabetes.
A 50-sow unit cost $3 million to build - and the company, as focused as it was on the implant trials, did not have "$3 million to spare at the moment".
Venture Southland was working with groups on a proposal to invest in the project's next stage, and Living Cell hoped to respond to it by the end of the year.
Prof Elliott said the Community Trust of Southland was involved.
Subsequent checks showed trust-owned Invest South, not the trust itself, could invest in such a project.
It would "most definitely not be a grant, but a commercial proposition", Prof Elliot said.
"We now need to see how it might work out, but I think it demonstrates a very definite willingness to just get on with it."
Invest South chairman Peter Carnahan said his organisation had not seen the proposal but was interested in considering it, while Venture Southland group manager enterprise and strategic projects Steve Canny said the proposal was at its early stages.
He could not say how much it would raise, but said it was "more likely at the level of contribution where a consortium would have be involved".
Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt said it was important southern investors contributed to Living Cells' work, after saying in a radio debate yesterday that the project was an example of his council promoting jobs.
Responding to mayoral challenger Suzanne Prentice's concern about his council spending $10 million on industrial land at Awarua, Mr Shadbolt said it had spawned a milk treatment plan, a freezing works, and a pig-rearing unit chasing a cure for diabetes.
"We are presently involved in a biotech industry ... and that is potentially a $3 billion construction industry that will create 1000 jobs in the city, so I think that council has to get stuck in directly and actually create jobs and create work, and we are doing that as a council," Mr Shadbolt said.
Mr Canny subsequently told the Otago Daily Times that the Living Cell project could mean 2500 jobs - long term - if 40 quarantine facilities were built.
Prof Elliott said Mr Shadbolt's figures were "long term, but not unreasonable - but, as with all promises, conditional on a number of other things being set in place".
Southland remained "a preferred area, in a way" and the company was keen to build on the success of the rearing unit.
That plan included adding a manufacturing facility to an expanded breeding facility in a gradual process that will start with "staging-up" to accommodate a bigger pig herd.
"At the moment we have to fly the pigs to Auckland when we need the cells, and that is expensive. It's a charter flight.
"So the idea would be to have at least some processing done down there, and then all of it later.
"Transporting cells, rather than pigs, is definitely cheaper."
