An Edmonton based molecular diagnostics company hopes to have a quick cost effective on-farm test for identifying the presence of the virus responsible for Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea available to producers within the next year.
Aquila Diagnostic Systems, in partnership with Swine Innovation Porc, is in the process of adapting a diagnostics test it developed for detecting the presence of malaria in humans to detect PEDv in pigs.
Chief Operating Officer David Alton says the concept has been demonstrated to be effective in a proof of principle phase but another six to nine months additional assessment is still needed.
What the test involves is small commercially available instrument called a thermal cycler or a PCR machine. What the producer would do is collect a sample and take a small part of that sample and then put it in a small test tube, perhaps the length of your finger nail.
Inside that tube is our secret sauce, which has all of the primers and reagents and material needed to do a test. You close the lid and you put that test into the machine and, through a series of heat cycling up and down you’re producing many more copies of what might be in there and then through some magic of the technology you can detect whether that genetic material is in that tube.
If you have markers for PEDv in that tube and they match up with your sample then you actually have a yes no result at the end.
~ David Alton, Aquila Diagnostic Systems
Alton says the off the shelf thermal cycler costs about five thousand dollars U.S. and, while pricing has not yet been finalized, the tests will cost in the range of five to 20 dollars per test. He says the cost of the test will be lower than that of a laboratory analysis but the big advantage will be a turnaround time of hours compared to days.
