Biological research into animal health drenches

The Government is investing money in biological research to find a new generation of more effective animal health drenches, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to farming internationally reports The Taranaki Daily. Scientists are looking for active molecules which will overcome the drench-resistance factor that makes current worm treatment remedies ineffective over time. ParaCo Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crown Research Institute AgResearch, has signed agreements with research groups giving it exclusive animal health screening rights for several potentially active biological molecules. ParaCo has been established to screen molecule libraries for animal health activity and has grown out of restructuring of the Wool Consortium, Ovita and the buyout of Wool Equities Ltd and Meat and Wool New Zealand's ParaCo shareholding by AgResearch. Dr Ian Boddy, managing director of ParaCo and commercial manager of AgResearch, said: "Our initial aim was to access molecules with known biological activity and then test whether they had any effect on key animal health targets such as gastrointestinal nematode parasites. By choosing molecules designed to be biologically active, we hoped to increase our chance of finding activity in our area of interest." He says the budget allocation so far is $1 million, but the potential under international patent protection would be hundreds of millions of dollars. However, getting a new drench on to the market is 8-10 years away, he estimates. ParaCo will use the world-class animal health capability within its parent company to undertake the screening of these molecules. The creation of ParaCo was carefully planned, says Dr Boddy. "When we looked around for libraries of compounds that fitted our bill we wanted to focus on some of the world class chemistry from within New Zealand before looking anywhere else. Initially we chose University of Auckland as they have both an active synthetic chemistry group under Professor Margaret Brimble, as well as an internationally recognised cancer research group, both of whom had libraries of molecules available for screening."