Saturday, March 30, 2024

Top marks for bio-tech test

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While one is a virus and the other a bacteria covid-19 and Mycoplasma bovis are both in the sights of Auckland biotech company Pictor. Chief executive Howard Moore spoke to Richard Rennie about his company’s leading-edge testing technology making a timely debut.
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WORK to tackle two of New Zealand’s biggest biosecurity incursions is likely to pay big dividends on the world stage as biotechnology company Pictor moves to develop and commercialise testing technology for Mycoplasma bovis and covid-19.

The company has just received $500,000 from the $25 million Covid-19 Innovation Acceleration Fund that supports the development of covid-19 detection, treatment and prevention technology.

It has also received funding to develop a more sensitive M bovis test. 

The money comes as the Government has released technical data showing the fight against M bovis is being won. The disease’s transmission rate is now at 0.4, with a rate below one indicating it is falling. At the start of the outbreak it was at two.

Pictor’s M bovis test represents next generation testing and was developed when the company was approached by Melbourne University clinicians who supply the current M bovis bulk milk test to NZ.

“They realised that by applying our technology and multiplexing the number of biomarkers detected in a sample it was possible to deliver a test that was more sensitive than the current one,” Pictor chief executive Howard Moore said. 

A biomarker is a naturally occurring signature molecule, gene or characteristic that enables a disease or process to be identified.

The key parameters for a diagnostic test are its specificity and sensitivity and Pictor’s test takes sensitivity to a level ahead of existing techniques.

The test can detect antibodies against multiple M bovis antigens rather than detecting antibodies against a single antigen. 

It will be a year before the test is in commercial form.

M bovis strategic advisory group chairman Dr John Roche said the development comes as the prevalence of the disease starts to reduce and detecting it gets harder. 

“To provide confidence NZ is free of M bovis, background surveillance will continue for some years after the delimiting stage of eradication, which is focused on eliminating M bovis.”

Better diagnostics will play a significant part in accelerating eradication.

This week Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said the delimiting phase, which aims to find and eliminate M bovis, will continue until 2021 then background surveillance testing will continue for about seven years. There are 17 active properties and 154,000 cattle have been culled to date.

Moore said there is no question the pursuit of M bovis elimination was the right path to take and the attention of the world’s veterinary community is on how well NZ is doing it. 

The M bovis diagnostic technology shares some of its smarts with the company’s covid-19 testing kit, which it hopes to have out within six months. 

The ability to detect multiple biomarkers also sits behind this technology and enables clinicians to test for the virus at different stages of infection, enabling early diagnosis of infected patients. 

It is particularly critical for covid-19 testing because victims are often asymptomatic.

The technology provides results in less than an hour. 

It can be done cheaply and does not rely on specialist support equipment, making it ideal for use in remote, less developed countries.

The quick turnaround claim has been one that several companies overseas have made about their tests, often only to find they fall over with false positive/false negative results, making their accuracy questionable.

The most prominent example is the Abbott test used by the White House and touted by Donald Trump. The Federal Drug Administration issued an alert in mid May about that test’s recurring false negative readings.

Moore hopes Pictor’s test will be available commercially within six months in NZ with a fair wind and a little luck.

Developing the technology has been the most exciting in a long career of bio-technology and agri-science. That includes starting Fonterra’s bio-tech subsidiary ViaLactia in the late 1990s. 

With renowned scientist Dr Ross Clark he founded drug company Tercica, which developed a growth hormone drug for children. He has also spent time working in the dairy industry in China and heading the BioPacificVentures science fund.

He sees combating covid-19 and M bovis as casting a biosecurity halo around NZ, one that will help preserve an increasingly valuable pharmaceutical industry that uses animal-sourced compounds in products like vaccines and serums.

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