Ag-West Biotech last week handed out $590,000 to companies and agencies working on projects as diverse as treating human cold sores to a Canada-Singapore research project investigating “jumping genes.”
The lion’s share, $240,000, went to the Saskatoon Colostrum Co. to help it move its product, called Headstart, into the United States market.
Deborah Haines, a veterinarian and partner in the company, said the product is dried colostrum from dairy cows. Calves get disease immunity from their mother’s colostrum milk, but as many as 25 percent of calves get inadequate amounts of the post-birth milk, she said.
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The company grew out of Haines’s investigation of colostrum replacement products about 10 years ago.
“They were of appalling quality and I said I can’t believe that we can’t make a better colostrum supplement than that,” she said.
Headstart’s strength is that it comes from mature dairy cows whose colostrum has better antibody levels than young animals.
“And as microbiologists we have the capability to test it … for antibody levels, for bacteria levels, and we do discard up to 10 percent of the colostrum we buy because the quality isn’t high enough.”
The product is already sold in Canada and Germany. When it enters the U.S., Haines expects to have to triple its collection base of 110 Saskatchewan dairies.
Termidor Corp. got $150,000 from Ag-West to further develop its product, Termidol V, a plant extract that appears effective against herpes simplex A, the virus that causes cold sores.
John Korner, Termidor president, wouldn’t reveal the source of the ingredient, but said the plant can be grown on the Prairies. The company is already conducting animal tests and is isolating the active ingredient in the extract.
“I would say in a year or 18 months we should have a product on the market.”
He also hopes the product will be effective against genital herpes.
Prairie Plant Systems of Saskatoon will use its $150,000 equity investment to further its work in developing plants for mine site revegetation.
It also is working with plants with proteins that have potential for treating cancer.
And the National Research Council’s Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon got $50,000 to help it in a $400,000, two-year project jointly funded with the National Science and Technology Board of Singapore.
The project is aimed at putting transposon gene constructs into wheat and barley.
Kutty Kartha, director general of the institute, said transposon are “elements of DNA that keep on jumping. They are jumping genes.”
He said transposon genes in corn are the reason why types have multi-color grain in one cob.
The transposon acts as a flag as it hops into various genes, affecting the traits associated with them. This way, it helps to map gene sequences, identifying what gene is associated with what trait.
The Singapore group has transposon in a wild relative of canola. The Canadian group will try to transfer the technology to wheat and barley.
Bought out investment
At the same ceremony, Ag-West’s president Peter McCann announced that Bioriginal Food and Science Corp., which produces nutraceutical products, recently bought out Ag-West’s original equity investment of $200,000.
With direct funding from Saskatchewan Agriculture and returns from its previous investments, Ag-West invests in Saskatchewan’s biotechnology industry.
