By Charles Wolfe
The Associated Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky intends to recruit or help launch companies that can turn plants and other farm products into such things as pharmaceuticals, Gov. Ernie Fletcher said Monday.

"I want to move into advanced agriculture," Fletcher said at a news conference. "It's an area where I think we have a niche ... that's unlike any other in the world."

But first, Kentucky must retool a business recruitment system that was historically geared toward manufacturers and which put a premium on volume of jobs created, Fletcher and other officials said.

For "life science" or "bioscience" companies, tax breaks may be less meaningful than laboratory space or university research assistance, they said.

Such companies can generate and invest huge amounts of money with comparatively few employees. But they also may take years to hit their stride.

"There are benefits these life science companies can bring to the state other than just job creation," Alex Day, manager of Kentucky Natural Products Fund in Louisville, said in an interview.

Day is heading a newly created Governor's Life Sciences/Biosciences Consortium, a group of government, industry and education leaders whose job is to devise a strategy for attracting high-tech entrepreneurs.

Economic Development Secretary Gene Strong, a member of the consortium board, said the administration will initially target "seven or eight companies" identified by Fletcher and a Kentucky contingent at a biotechnology conference in San Francisco last month.

William Brundage, the administration's "new economy" point man, said life science - "using plants as a factory" - was identified years ago as an area ripe for growth.

Brundage said Kentucky had the potential to be a world leader in production of pharmaceuticals from plants, drawing on years of tobacco research and development of artificial hearts.

"Kentucky now owns some valuable technology nobody else owns," Brundage said.

Among the best-known of Kentucky's biotech companies is Large Scale Biology Inc. of Owensboro, which makes customized proteins.

Another company, ApoImmune of Louisville, has been lining up backers for its production of "human therapeutics" - using tobacco plants to produce cancer-fighting proteins.

Also Monday, Brundage, who was recruited to Kentucky by then-Gov. Paul Patton to head a state Office for the New Economy, said he soon would be leaving his agency, which Fletcher has renamed the Department of Innovation and Commercialization for the Knowledge Based Economy.

Brundage said he was not retiring but was ready to "do something else." Fletcher said he hoped to persuade Brundage to remain in Kentucky.

Brundage headed technology development projects in Florida and Kansas prior to coming to Kentucky.