Link to genetic pioneer cut

By SIMON COLLINS

A deal between a Dairy Board subsidiary and the American company that described the genetic structure of the human body, Celera, has ended.

The deal, announced in May last year, involved Celera working with the Dairy Board's $150 million biotech company, ViaLactia, to specify the genetic structure of cows.

But ViaLactia managing director Kevin Marshall says the two companies are no longer working together.

"We entered the Celera agreement with the intention of exploring the feasibility of mapping the whole bovine genome.

"We have agreed that that is not necessary at this stage because we believe that the bovine genome will be in the public domain within the foreseeable future anyway, and the cost was too high.

"We did some work. We decided not to proceed - mutually."

He denied that the deal was worth $30 million.

ViaLactia announced on June 1 that it had done a new deal with a Missouri company, Orion Genomics, to identify the complete gene set of "a key forage grass species," believed to be rye grass, or possibly clover.

But Dr Marshall said that ViaLactia's work on cows was "at an earlier stage than with forage."

A former ViaLactia executive who left last September to start his own biotech company, Howard Moore, said Celera had had "a huge impact on the development of genomics" and he had not been aware that its deal with ViaLactia had ended.

"To work with one of the foremost biotech companies in the world was a real opportunity for New Zealand," he said.

"If they are no longer working with Celera, then it seems to me like a lost opportunity, and that is disappointing."

A former AgResearch scientist who served on the review group which advised the Dairy Board on setting up ViaLactia in 1999, Dr Robert Welch, said the company's forage work was only about 15 per cent of its programme, while the work on cows was meant to be 75 to 80 per cent of its work.

He said the value of the Celera deal for ViaLactia was not just specifying the cow gene sequence itself.

It was also using Celera's gene data on humans, mice and other animals to work out what the various genes in cows actually did.