KEY POINTS:
A tiny company backed by The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall says it is winning a worldwide race to extract a brain acid from algae which may provide a remedy for depression.
Henderson-based Photonz is producing micro-organisms which generate eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids normally found in fish which eat the algae.
This acid and its cousin, known as DHA, have become a holy grail for the food industry because they are seen as beneficial for a range of modern disorders from heart disease to dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
A trial now under way in Durham, England, has found that 40 per cent of children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities show dramatic learning improvements by taking supplements of EPA and other brain acids.
Photonz chief executive Karl Geiringer said his company was focused on depression because New Zealand had one of the world's highest rates of depressive disorders. "We also have one of the lowest fish consumptions."
"There has been a study by Joseph Hibbeln at the [US] National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s which looked at 60 countries and plotted fish consumption and depression. Right across all the 60 countries there was an inverse correlation - Japan at one end with the highest fish consumption and low depression, and New Zealand at the other end with the reverse."
Despite the recent evidence of the health advantages of fish, its consumption has been dropping around the world and replaced by hamburgers and soy-based foods.
Mr Geiringer said DHA was now commonly extracted from fish oil and was used in baby formula, but EPA was harder to extract.
He said the Australian Government had put more than $10 million in the past year into a plan to genetically engineer terrestrial plants to produce EPA and DHA.
The European group BASF and academic groups in Europe, America and Australia were also working on it.
But Protonz had already filed for three patents and Mr Geiringer said: "I believe we are ahead of the others.
"We are using a naturally occurring organism so we are not genetically engineering anything, and we are inducing it to produce the EPA in a way that makes it much easier to get out, and we are using new technology to get it out.
"We produce the organism in a fermentation process and we use sub-photosynthetic light frequencies.
"In the past it's been done the other way round - the organisms have been grown outdoors in sunlight and just need a bit of sugar to make them grow faster. We grow them inside in the dark, feed them a lot of sugar, then give them a little bit of light to encourage them to put the EPA in the right place. Hence the name Photonz."
Mr Geiringer, a son of the late Dr Erich Geiringer, worked as a film-maker in the Netherlands for six years and as a science writer for Elsevier before returning to retrain at the Auckland Medical School in 1999.
He served a term on Wellington's Capital Coast District Health Board from 2001 to 2004 "trying to convince them to take an interest in diet among the most vulnerable of their people, namely people in prisons, in hospitals, in old age homes and mental patients".
He found board staff "incredibly resistant" and did not stand again at the last election.
He said Photonz had almost $1 million in capital from about 40 shareholders including Mr Tindall.
The board is chaired by former Auckland University business professor Alastair MacCormick.
