An alternative to antibiotics has received approval from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Amplimune is a therapeutic immunobiologic product for cattle released by NovaVice Inc., an Ontario company.
“This registration in Canada is the first you will see using this patented immune stimulating technology,” said company president Graeme McRae. He was involved earlier with a company called Bioniche Life Sciences. It developed a vaccine against E. coli bacteria in cattle. NovaVice obtained the technology to produce this product.
The product employs mycobacterium cell wall fraction technology (MCWF) to activate an immune response in the animal. MCWF interacts with common signalling pathways used by different cell types of the immune system.
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The mycobacterium is derived from soil. It is being recommended to treat young calves for bacteria like E. coli 99, which can cause a virulent form of diarrhea. The product is injected in the first day of life with a follow-up treatment seven days later.
It does not override the maternal antibodies found in colostrum. A company trial has shown it works well in vulnerable veal calves that have not received colostrum and are often immuno-suppressed.
The product is undergoing further research but until good clinical data is available, uptake on it will be low, said Murray Jelinski, Alberta Chair in Beef Cattle Health and Production Medicine Large Animal Clinical Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. He has also been involved in approving veterinary pharmaceutical products.
He expects more of these products will seek registration as concerns grow over antibiotic use in food animals.
If they do prove to work well, the market will respond and producers will buy them. They also need to be practical and he suspects many producers with a large cow-calf operation may not have the time to treat calves in the first day of life.
This type of treatment has been known since the 1940s. It has the potential to boost the immune system, but often antimicrobials are still needed because the immune system is already overwhelmed.
“There is a growing burgeoning class of drugs that are the natural type products that do not have a proper regulatory pathway and the government has not been sure what to do with them. Colostrum supplements is an example,” he said.
“All countries in the world are struggling with these drugs that fall in between,” he said.
