A Canadian researcher believes his company may have a reliable method of live BSE testing.
“I know there have been a lot of companies make the claim of having a live test and then you hear nothing. We have a successful test and it works repeatedly,” said George Adams, president and chief executive officer of Amorfix in Toronto.
Current methods of widespread BSE testing involve tests on the brain, so they can only be used on animals post mortem.
This eliminates opportunities to establish genetic lines of cattle less susceptible to BSE.
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Conventional post-mortem testing is performed on the oldest animals and those showing signs of mental defect. Those tests won’t find bovine spongiform encephalopathy in its earliest stages and they must be performed on specific brain-stem tissues to be accurate. The Amorfix test uses blood samples from live and potentially younger animals.
The company is betting that the misfolded prion proteins are present in blood and possibly other tissues outside the specified risk materials that most government scientific agencies have identified.
“We believe the prions are present in blood,” said Adams. “We know they are in human (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease) and other TSEs so it makes some sense we would find them at likely very small levels in bovine blood.”
He said the Amorfix test is capable of finding a single misfolded prion in one millilitre of blood.
Because prions are made up of clumps of single misfolded proteins, they are difficult to find in blood, which is full of regular proteins.
“There is too much protein noise to be able to single out prions. But with epitope protection, we use antibodies to find the misfolded proteins.”
The test uses a chemical to modify epitopes, which are specific parts of proteins where antibodies attach. Once the epitope is changed, protein antibodies can’t find them. The chemical used to modify the epitopes doesn’t affect the clump of misfolded proteins, so standard antibodies to prion proteins can be used to find the misfolded offenders.
Amorfix is commercializing work done at the University of Toronto by Neil Cashman and Marty Lehto.
They, along with Adams and a team at Amorfix, are using funding arranged by public share offerings and financing by First Associates in Calgary to develop a “robust, high assay, high throughput” testing system that will be inexpensive enough to test large numbers of animal or human samples.
Adams said it now costs $600 per BSE test and that is only useful once an animal is dead, further increasing costs to the livestock industry. He said the ability to test large populations might open doors to development of vaccines or other treatments against TSEs.
Amorfix hopes to have a low cost, high speed test ready by 2008.
