Chinese leader to see NZ's Sars work

By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter

A New Zealand firm at the forefront of research against the Sars virus is to show its work to Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Dr Arie Geursen, a DNA expert who is now chief operations officer of the Auckland biotechnology company Virionyx, will outline its investigations in the search to find a drug to combat the virus.

The research is of great interest to China because Sars is believed to have originated in the mainland.

In Bangkok this week for the Apec forum, Mr Hu said China "felt guilty for the whole world" when the death toll from the virus began climbing. Dr Geursen, who came to New Zealand at the age of 10 from Holland, was a co-founder in 1994 of one of New Zealand's first biotech companies, Genesis.

Two years ago he joined Virionyx, a small company started by an American immigrant, Dr Frank Gelder, who aimed to grow antibodies in goats to combat the HIV virus in humans.

Unlike the United States, New Zealand is one of a handful of countries classified "A1" for the absence of animal diseases, and Dr Gelder had found that goats produced antibodies to fight off HIV.

Virionyx now has 600 goats on two properties, one in the central North Island and one near Timaru.

Its HIV drug, made from the goats' antibodies, is in clinical trials at the Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In August, Virionyx teamed with New York State's Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute and an associated company, ZeptoMetrix, to see if the goats could also be used to produce antibodies for Sars and other contagious diseases.

An inactive form of the Sars virus arrived at Virionyx's Mangere laboratory two weeks ago and will soon be injected into the goats.

The company has 1300 shareholders in New Zealand and others in Australia and the United States.