Orchid BioSciences, Inc. is providing an update on its food safety business, which focuses on disease susceptibility and identity DNA testing of animals. Orchid is a provider of susceptibility testing for scrapie, the "mad cow"-like disease in sheep, and this year it tested over half a million sheep in its high-throughput facility in the UK The company is now expanding its scrapie genotyping business and leveraging its expertise and technology to develop assays for DNA-based food traceability applications.

Orchid Europe is conducting the major portion of the growing UK-government-funded DNA testing effort to eliminate scrapie from the national sheep flock, with the goal of reducing the potential risk that the disease could pose to the food supply. Scrapie is caused by prions, or aberrant proteins and is similar to "mad cow" disease. Orchid Europe is the leading private provider of testing services to identify those sheep that are genetically resistant to scrapie. By only using the most genetically resistant sheep for breeding, disease-prone animals will eventually be eradicated from the national flock. European Union legislation mandates that all EU nations must implement a scrapie susceptibility testing program in 2004, and Orchid intends to pursue sheep genotyping contracts in additional European countries.

With an estimated sheep population of 40 million in the UK alone, the potential for continued growth in Orchid's testing volumes is strong.

"The recent incidents involving mad cow disease in cattle in the US and Canada are fueling consumer food safety concerns worldwide and increasing demands for additional measures to ensure the safety of meat products," said George Poste, DVM, PhD, chairman of Orchid BioSciences and a former veterinary medicine researcher. "Both preventative disease susceptibility testing and DNA-based food traceability testing can help governments, farmers and livestock companies to ensure the safety of these products used by millions each day. Orchid has the requisite technology, systems, infrastructure and expertise to further build its leadership in these important and growing segments."

Some researchers believe that cattle are also likely to differ in their genetic susceptibility to mad cow disease. While efforts to uncover these differences have not been successful to date, scientists are using advances in genetic data availability and analysis to continue the search. Identification of these differences would offer the possibility of using selective breeding to reduce mad cow disease susceptibility in cattle and thereby largely eliminate the threat from herds.