Farmscape for April 6, 2018
The Chief Operating Officer with Aquila Diagnostic Systems says an of farm analysis being developed to identify the presence of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus will shorten the turn around time while cutting the cost of the test.
Aquila Diagnostic Systems, in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc, is adapting a diagnostics test it developed for detecting the presence of malaria in humans to detect PEDv in pigs.
Chief Operating Officer David Alton says the analysis is conducted with a commercially available thermal cycler which uses a small tube containing the primers, reagents and other material needed to detect the virus.
Clip-David Alton-Aquila Diagnostic Systems:
At the current time there are tests for PEDv but that involves sending samples to a central lab away from the farm.
Our is designed to be on farm.
We have a small instrument about the size of a bread box perhaps and a disposable test which you would put your sample into, press go and you have results in one to two hours.
The machine itself is an off the shelf instrument.
It's about five thousand dollars U.S. and the tests, depending on how many you buy and the volume, are in the range of five to 20 dollars per test.
A test quite often in a conventional lab where you're doing what they call a PCR test one at a time might be 25 to 30 dollars so we're trying to be pricing at below that.
Molecular biology is something that is done in commercial labs.
It's quite expensive with large pieces of equipment.
The trend across the biotech sector, the human health and veterinary sector is to take things out of the lab if possible and drive down costs.
Alton says the company has successfully completed the proof of principle phase but a couple of more phases are needed before taking the process to an on site in barn trial.
He estimates that will take another six to nine months and he hopes to have a product available within the next year.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork