UND Geese Provide Medical Miracles - Valley News Live - KVLY/KXJB - Fargo/Grand Forks

UND Geese Provide Medical Miracles

  A small bio-tech company in the northern valley is on the verge of creating what can only be described as medical miracles with worldwide implications.

  Researchers at Avianax are working in collaboration with UND to produce serums, which could one day be used to treat a wide variety of diseases.

  It all started out as a research project to develop a serum to protect people from a pesky outdoors nuisance and the disease it can carry, the West Nile virus.

  Mosquitoes can pickup the virus from diseased birds and transfer it to humans.

    Researchers found that geese can rapidly produce the antibodies needed to create serums to treat people for West Nile disease. But, what's most amazing, research hers found that geese can be used to produce serums to treat all kinds of diseases.

Richard Glynn, Avianax: "And we have gone into researching its use of their antibodies for dengo fever, for pandemic influenza, malaria, rabies. We're also working with a group on cancer."

  Researchers introduce the dead virus of any given disease to a goose. The goose quickly produces an antibody to that disease, which is extracted from its egg yolk and used to create the serum to treat that disease.

David Bradley, UND Medical School: "What's really exciting about this is the goose provides a platform and produces antibodies rapidly to a variety of viruses, probably toxins, maybe even cancers."

  All of this still depends on approval for human use by the Federal Drug Administration.

  However, the Federal Government is already interested in this research project, because it could be used to quickly develop vaccines for biological agents spread by terrorists.