Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Firm to develop M.Bovis, Covid–19 tests
Auckland-based biotech firm
Pictor has been awarded funding from the Government to develop diagnostic tests for both Covid-19 and Mycoplasma Bovis.
The firm, founded in 2005, had reached an agreement with the M. Bovis Programme run by Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb to research a more sensitive test for the detection of M. Bovis.
The programme had allocated up to $30m for research projects related to M. Bovis but the amount awarded to Pictor would not be disclosed, Pictor chief executive Howard Moore said.
John Roche, chairman of the M. Bovis Strategic Science Advisory Group and chief science adviser at MPI, said the development of a more sensitive test had the potential to optimise future testing.
‘‘The programme’s testing regime is really good for this stage of the eradication programme but, in 12-to-18 months as the prevalence of the disease in the cattle population gets lower and lower, the ability to detect it will get harder and harder.
‘‘To provide confidence New Zealand is free of M. Bovis, background surveillance will continue for some years after the current delimiting stage of the eradication, which is focused on eliminating M. Bovis.’’
Better diagnostics would play a critical role in accelerating the eradication of M. Bovis and in preventing another incursion, he said.
MBIE also awarded the company $500,000 from its $25 million Covid-19 Innovation
Acceleration Fund to develop a test to detect infection in less than an hour.
‘‘Current diagnostic testing in New Zealand for Covid-19 is slow, complex, expensive, and must be done in a specialist central laboratory,’’ Howard Moore said.
‘‘We propose developing a new diagnostic test to detect SARSCoV-2 infection at all stages of the Covid-19 disease. It will involve the simultaneous detection of specific biomarkers involved in different stages of infection, enabling early diagnosis of infected patients, including asymptomatic patients.’’
The test, which was estimated to take about six months to develop, was intended to be fast and cheap with no requirement for specialist infrastructure so it could be deployed globally and be used in developing countries, decentralised labs and remote locations, Moore said.
Pictor’s technology allowed it to test for multiple biomarkers from one small sample of blood, serum or milk. This meant more than one disease could be tested for at a time.
The test’s improved sensitivity reduced the complexity, sample volume and costs of analysis, Moore said.
One of the problems with testing for Covid-19 had been getting the right diagnostics.
‘‘Test have been developed really quickly and rushed into the market, there haven’t been enough clinical trials and the review process hasn’t had enough rigour,’’ Moore said.
The diagnostics had to be able to detect the infection at whatever stage it was at so that people who were asymptomatic or had an advanced infection could be equally identified, he said.
The test would be able to detect the infection even before antibodies could be detected, normally around 10-to-15 days after exposure to the virus, or even after a person recovered.