Dong Nai Biotechnology Centre: Laying Foundation to Form Urban Technology Area

Located in Xuan Duong, Cam My district, Dong Nai province, in an area of 207.8 hectares, the Dong Nai Biotechnology Centre has 3 main buildings: administrative centre, research centre of science and biotechnology, and experimental production centre. Since it was established, the Centre has determined its direction is to focus on application and selectively grasp the results of domestic and foreign research institutes and centres to build the empirical models and transfer the research results to producers.

 

Besides, Dr Pham Van Sang, Director of Dong Nai Department of Science and Technology, said that the Centre is open to be upgraded to a specialised high-tech area of biotechnology. According to Dr Sang, the establishment of this Centre is to create a premise to establish and develop a high-tech area of biotechnology, leading the formation of urban science complex in the future.

 

Currently, the Centre is implementing 16 science and technology projects, of which 9 topics and projects are grouped in the agricultural sector. Some topics such as the GAP mushroom production model have been admitted and transferred to farmers, bringing initial effective results. The Centre also is developing models for growing cocoa and creating the market for this product. Besides, it is also running some probiotics projects to eliminate odour during the manufacturing of organic fertilizer from animal waste at Trang Bom district. The topics that are initially applied during the production process have gained many benefits for producers in reducing environmental pollution and producing fertilizer from waste. In addition, the Centre also has produced the biological products to provide farmers and building the project on diagnostic test of pathogens of green ears and acute diarrhoea in pigs by means of molecular biology, which helps to find out 6 pathogens of the PEDV diarrhea and ear green and diagnose the disease quickly on the pigs in order to reduce the disease and improve the livestock production more efficiently.

Along with the application of a series of scientific research achievements into production, the Dong Nai Biotechnology Centre is also completing the infrastructure and building the operational mechanism to attract investment, training human resources and applying biotechnology in agriculture to breed plants and livestock for the province.

 

These early efforts of the staff and engineers of the Dong Nai Biotechnology Centre have paid off. The land, once known as "godforsaken", has been flourishing each day due to the great contribution of the scientists. Although the Centre was built under difficult conditions and lack of capital, it now creates a milestone through the active technology applied models in agricultural sector. The whole terrain located at the slope along with the stream was the areas where many pilot production models have been implemented efficiently. These are the high-tech models applied on some of plants such as sweet peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, leafy vegetables and spices, durian, and orchards.

 

On the other hand, during the recent time, the Centre has collaborated with major partners such as University of Agriculture and Forestry, Ho Chi Minh University of Natural Sciences, Biotechnology Centre of Ho Chi Minh City, High-tech Agricultural Zone of Ho Chi Minh City, and South Eastern Fruit Research Centre. As a result, the Centre has introduced many application models with diverse technologies on some fruits and vegetables such as melon, in-house cucumber (3,000 m2), Mokara orchids (5,000 m2), avocado (3 hectares), mango and rambutan (3 hectares); mangosteen and durian (6 hectares).

 

Operated for a few years, the Centre has attracted 5 investment firms that invest in some specialized biotechnology projects including: PNC hydroponic Co., Ltd, Gene Viet Tat Thanh Co., Ltd, Cong Thanh Biotechnology Co., Ltd, Thien Dia Nhan Pharmacy JSC, Viet Nong Co., Ltd. Furthermore, the Centre also attracts competent and passionate engineers with high qualifications from different regions in the country. There are 8 people with master's degrees (two of them are fellows), 18 bachelors (five of them are attending higher education in the specialized biology), 2 people with college degrees and one person with high-school degree. It is expected that in the near future, the number of enterprises and scientific staff in the Centre will continue to increase.

 

Broadly speaking, with clear direction and highly selective high-tech applications through inheritance from the results of domestic and international research institutes, universities and research Centres to build empirical models and transfer research results for production, the Dong Nai Biotechnology Centre has become a bridge to put science in practice. This contributes greatly to the improvement of the production capacity for the farmers and businesses and becomes a new direction for social and economic development in the period of industrialization and modernization of the country.