Company closing in on vaccine for killer virus in pigs
Brandon Sun - ONLINE EDITION
By: Murray McNeill
Wednesday, Mar. 5, 2014 at 8:06 AM | Comments: 0
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A Manitoba biotech company says it is about three months away from producing an effective vaccine to combat a highly contagious and deadly virus that has killed millions of baby pigs in North America.
A Manitoba biotech company says it is about three months away from producing an effective vaccine to combat a highly contagious and deadly virus that has killed millions of baby pigs in North America.
Zyme Fast Inc., which has a lab just outside Winnipeg in the RM of Springfield, said the new vaccine will be a variation of a vaccine it developed about three years ago to successfully combat an Asian strain of the same virus. The virus is called porcine epidemic diarrhea, or PED for short.
"Not only is it effective in protecting piglets from contracting PED, it also cures those already infected," Zyme Fast president Terence Sellen said Tuesday. "To the best of our knowledge, the Zyme Fast technology is the only one used in China."
Sellen said the primary North American strain of the virus shares about 92 per cent of the characteristics of the Asian variety. So Zyme Fast only needs to modify the Asian vaccine to make it nearly 100 per cent effective against the North American strain, rather than having to develop a whole new vaccine from scratch.
"We use a proven vaccine research and design protocol that we've developed and used to produce the Asian PED vaccine as well as other effective vaccines and animal-health products that are delivered as powdered animal-feed supplements," Sellen said. "(So) barring any unexpected glitches, we're confident we can have an effective vaccine ready for approval in about three months."
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Company closing in on vaccine for killer virus in pigs