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Today 7/31/2006 6:11:00 PM


Canadian Co Sees New BSE Test Available Within 2 Years

WINNIPEG (Dow Jones)--An Edmonton-based company is hoping to have a new, inexpensive test for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, on the market within the next two years.

Ron Arnold, of BSE Prion Solutions, says the urine test will be able to detect BSE as well as other prion diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and Alzheimer's disease in humans.

He explained that the test will detect prions as well as the precursor prions, which, when found, indicates a susceptibility to BSE. "If everything goes well, it could be less than two years until the test is available," Arnold said. "It depends on how fast the data is accumulated."

Arnold, who owns exclusive rights to the patent and product for the Americas and Europe, says he and U.K.-based parent company Biotech Global sent the test protocol to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland almost three years ago. Currently, he said, the test is in the final stages of development at the university.

"Initially when this test was developed, it didn't work beyond 60% to 75% of the time," Arnold said. "So, under contract to Biotech Global, Case Western University further developed the test. They completely stripped it down, analyzed it, tweaked it and came up with all of the keys necessary to make it work 100% of the time." He said all that is required to detect prions using the test is one millimeter of urine.

"Subsequent to Case Western's finding that everything is as it should be in our mind, it will then be presented to the OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) in Paris for approval," he said.

"We hope it will be the gold standard in testing live animals for BSE, and for testing humans for prion disease." Arnold said that he partnered up with Biotech Global shortly after the BSE crisis hit in 2003.

"It hit us hard, having to watch farmers and ranchers seeing their entire herd being slaughtered," Arnold said, "only to find that the brain tissue was okay, that there was no BSE anywhere to be found in any of the other 200 or 300 animals that CFIA slaughtered to test." He said the test would cost roughly C$10 per animal and no animals would have to be slaughtered.

"If we can show through routine testing that every animal in Canada can be tested - and there's no reason it can't be - it will enhance risk management, food safety, consumer confidence and the marketability of the product," he said.
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