Billion dollar baby

When Diana Hill went looking for significant new commercial opportunities in New Zealand's meat industry, she decided she'd better get down and dirty, so she spent a month in a meat processing plant asking where the hell the next billion dollar business was.

And then it came to her, possibly not like a light bulb going off in her head, but definitely a vision. A vision of a gene- testing device on a cellphone. Hill was set to be laughed out of town, despite her heavy-hitting reputation, which includes chairing the Royal Society of New Zealand's Marsden Fund committee, and setting up the University of Otago's molecular biology unit in 1986.

Instead she now heads Global Technologies, a joint venture she set up in 2001 with PPCS, the country's largest meat-processing company, with turnover of NZ$2.2 billion last year and markets in 70 countries. And her vision is fast becoming reality, a quantum leap that levers off the intellectual property already existing in the New Zealand meat industry.

Imagine a device almost like a barcode reader for DNA, portable and so simple it can be used by anyone. Wave it over a cut of meat in Sainsbury's in England and you get a unique DNA signature which can be traced back to tell you where the animal was killed in New Zealand, the hour, day and month it went through the works, what farm it came from, and quite possibly what shape the clouds were that day.

Global has tested a prototype in the laboratory and should have an operational unit which will sample, analyse and produce an electronic signal, ready sometime this year. The original deadline was the end of February but there have been a couple of glitches, says Hill, including holidays.

Simplifying DNA analysis

Food traceability is a hot issue around the world but current DNA testing is time consuming and expensive. If Global can perfect its portable device, it would be a small matter to establish the credentials of New Zealand lamb, for instance, anywhere it was sold in the world.

"It's something that could be used by a non-expert," says Martin Jones, Global's commercial manager. "And it's portable. It's very much a simplification of standard DNA analysis, but it's a simplification that allows you to trace a food sample in a cheap, quick manner in non-clinical settings. So if you have substitute Indian buffalo at Sainsbury's purporting to be New Zealand lamb, you go through and you take its signature and it just won't match with anything on the database."

And, as Hill points out, if someone is looking at a lamb chop in Sainsbury's in London and wants to be sure it came from New Zealand, and possibly what farm it came from, they want that information in real time.

The commercial opportunities seem endless; other uses could include screening for a virus or bacteria, to determine, for example whether someone had SARS, or whether a batch of white powder was anthrax, which makes border control an obvious use. It would have come in handy identifying tsunami victims. Instead of collecting samples and taking them to a sophisticated laboratory, Global's device could have been used anywhere on the affected coastlines.

But the flexibility of use poses questions for Global's board. What particular incarnation do they take to market and when? "It has biomedical applications almost immediately," says Hill, "but I think the attitude at the moment is to keep the food stuff at home and spin off the biomedical approach. I don't really think we have the expertise in New Zealand to take that to market."

To that end, Global has been talking to possible northern hemisphere partners, says Hill, but she won't divulge who they are at this stage. A key is to have an operational prototype ready otherwise it's hard to get taken seriously.

"We're talking to Trade and Enterprise but I don't want to talk about that. We've got lots of options, but New Zealand is a bit player and I don't think you realise that until, like me, you go out and start talking to unknowns. When you're carving out a new niche, you've got to have credibility."

How much has development cost so far? Again, the Global people maintain that's commercially sensitive. What Martin Jones will say is that what they have achieved is comparable in one way to the achievements of the Weta animation studios used by Peter Jackson. "They've done cutting-edge stuff on a limited budget. This has been expensive, but in comparison to what similar projects would spend in America or Europe, it's a drop in the ocean.

"The level of science we're undertaking isn't cutting edge. But it's a clever way that no one else has thought of doing. What a lot of people try and do is make incredibly sophisticated devices that are fabulously complex. However that takes a long time to filter into the market place. The sort of thing that is going on here is very innovative and clever but it's taking the opposite approach, making the simplest, most robust device possible to solve the problem."

Global is a reasonably small company with a staff of around 15 but it operates as a consortium combining biotechnology, IT and engineering, working in with other companies around Dunedin such as Scott Automation, one of the country's leading robotic development companies.

Global also has formal links with the University of Otago, and buys in technology from around the country, says Hill.

"I think it broadens the perspective of thinking. You have all sorts of people with a common goal but there aren't too many arguments because no one knows what you're talking about. You want to talk to an engineer about DNA and they want to talk to you about injection moulding."

Smooth operators

Think forensics and the popular image is that of Gil Grissom and co in the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation where the crimes are grisly, and the good guys are smooth and intuitive and prone to sensational intellectual leaps.

The Oxford Dictionary defines forensics as "relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime", which is where the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, or ESR comes in. The crown research institute is the country's major player in forensics, with particular expertise in criminal forensics, DNA technology, microbial forensics and food forensics.

New Zealand was the second country in the world after Britain to set up an international DNA database, and, with a hit rate of 53%, we now lead the world in matching unsolved crimes to the DNA database. The system was set up in 1996 with a major rebuild in 2001. Its notable successes include solving the murder of Maureen McKinnel, who was strangled and her body thrown off a bridge in Arrowtown in 1987, and the case of Teresa Cormack, who was abducted and murdered in 1987 near Napier.

But more groundbreaking work is being carried out in the fast developing field of microbial forensics, a field which emerged after 9/11 in response to bioterrorism threats.

New Zealand has a unique advantage because of the way ESR was set up to include a forensic science service, and an environmental health programme inherited from the former National Institute of Health, says communicable disease programme leader Fiona Thomson-Carter, who has a background in investigating food-borne infection including massive problems caused by the bug E.coli in Scotland in the mid 1990s. Thomson-Carter, who arrived in the country just over three years ago, wanted to work at ESR because of the reputation of its microbiology, which she says is as good as, if not better than, anything in Europe.

Thomson-Carter attributes that to the serendipitous combination of a forensic science service and environmental health programme, and what she calls a critical mass in microbiologists, which has contributed to ESR's world-class reputation in the field.

FBI scientist Bruce Budowle, who is current chair of the US Scientific Working Group on Microbial Genetics and Forensics, said much the same thing when he was here last year to deliver a paper on the topic at the Australian and New Zealand Forensics Science Society conference held at Te Papa. There was no single comparable federal agency in the US to match ESR's capability in both forensics and microbiology, said Budowle.

Dirty secrets

One team at ESR has patented a new microbial soil test for use in murder investigations that determines the time of death. In a project funded by the famed US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the ESR research team has pioneered the use of molecular technology in forensic soil analysis by matching soil samples through the bacterial communities living in them.

Forensic scientists have traditionally used the arrival time and growth rates of insects on a corpse to determine time of death, says team leader Dr Jacqui Horswell.

"But as a body decomposes, you get different types of gunk going into the soil so it changes over time and the bacterial community reacts to that change and also changes," explains Horswell. "So we thought we could use the bacteria in the same way insects have been used."

So far Horswell and her team have relied on pig corpses in New Zealand as a model for human decomposition as pigs have a physiological similarity to humans. Their collaborator in the US, Dr Arpad Vass, uses the real thing. Vass is a research and forensic scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and also attached to the University of Tennessee's Body Farm - real name The Forensic Anthropology Centre - made famous by Patricia Cornwall novels.

Vass had tried determining the time of death from bacteria in the soil and concluded that it was too difficult. He wrote about the experience in an article published in the New Scientist.

"So we cheekily emailed him and said we had a method," says Horswell. "Much to our surprise he got back to us, then he sent some soil samples from underneath decomposing bodies and we found our method worked really well. He's very keen, and came over here to run a few workshops, buried a few pigs over here and dug them up."

And Rachel Parkinson, who completed her MSc while working with Horswell's team and is currently doing a PhD specifically on body decomposition, will work with Vass next year.

"She'll get her own body, the lucky thing," says Horswell ghoulishly.

The team's aim is to develop a robust soil DNA profiling system which will stand up in court. It will be a precise analytical tool, says Horswell, "another tool in the box. It's very complicated to work out the time of death so the more tools the better". She estimates it will take another three to five years to perfect the kit.