AseBio

How biotech research in animal health has been key during this healthcare emergency

For World Health Day, we spoke with our members about the transversal nature of biotechnology and how work from one area can be applied in others, boosting animal, human and planet health 

foto vacas
Agathe Cortes
Healthcare
Coronavirus
Animal health

The exhaustive research in animal health that has been carried out for years in Spain has made it possible to have a Covid-19 vaccine nearly ready for market today. Spanish biotechnology company Hipra is a great example of how expertise gained in animal health and developing biotechnology tools allows scientists to resolve healthcare challenges that affect humans and the whole planet. “We all live in an increasingly complex, dense ecosystem, in which plant, animal and human health have to be aligned,” explains Javier Velasco, director of Quality and R&D at Bioiberica, an AseBio member that mentioned Hipra in our conversation.

For Bioiberica, it is impossible to work without thinking about global health, the One World, One Health concept created by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that is now in all the news and company dialogues. The company is a global leader in heparin production and its products come from animals. “Our relationship to animal health is all-encompassing. We have to ensure very strict control and traceability in each branch,” the expert adds. In 2008, Velasco explains, there was a fairly serious contamination issue with heparin from Asian manufacturers. As a result, new controls were mandated, which Bioiberica had already had in place for some time. This pushed them to the front of the pack in this area of biotechnology and the life sciences. 

But the challenges remain and zoonosis continues to fuel the concerns of biotechnologists, even more so in our globalised world. The work being done to understand how a virus spreads through a herd or a mink farm is key to human health and to preventing healthcare crises like we’ve experienced over the past two years. “Everyone is talking about PCR now. It seems like something new, but this tool has been around for years. We’ve used them to detect diseases in plants and animals too,” Velasco notes. 

Biotechnology is here to provide solutions and contribute knowledge and analyses to detect problems as quickly as possible and stop them. And to do so, diagnosis is very important. The views of Belén Barreiro, CEO of Ingenasa  (a diagnostics company) and AseBio vice-president, are in line with Velasco. The company is researching Covid-19 in minks: They are looking at how the disease evolves, how the virus replicates and how new outbreaks appear and evolve. “I think it’s extremely useful for proposing populational measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19,” the expert says. 

She believes veterinarians in charge of this type of facilities know a lot about epidemics, how to prevent them and how to control them, because they treat their animals as a population. “Doctors are different. They’re concerned about you and want to save you as an individual,” she adds. For her, it’s clear that research in animal health can provide the groundwork for treating humans: “Just as we use animal models to test the efficacy of a treatment or diagnostic tool, we can use animal models predictively to establish the epidemiology of a disease.” 

In short, knowledge on animal health helps accelerate research in human beings because it reflects comparable behaviours, and the coronavirus pandemic has proven this once again. Barreiro also gave the example of tuberculosis, explaining that the best way for a country to do away with it is, of course, to fight it on a human level, but cows also have to be brought into the equation. If they are left as reservoirs, the disease will never be eradicated. 

Although this may seem obvious, something curious runs through the Ingenasa CEO’s mind and puts up hurdles in the company’s day to day work. “We use exactly the same approaches for human and animal diagnostics. We use the same technology, but the regulatory framework is completely different.” The expert insists that it would be important to not only think of One Health, but to harmonise the regulations. “For us, if not, it’s complicated to reach the market because we have to meet the requirements for each country and each area separately,” she warns. 

At Zendal, they echo the words of the other two members interviewed: “Vaccine development processes are practically identical for humans and animals. What is different is the trials and authorisations, but the research done to reach the vaccines is very similar.” The biggest challenge they face, in working on vaccines and biotechnology for human and animal health, has to do with the preclinical testing on animals, which ensures the product is safe before it can be administered to humans

For all the experts, it’s very important for us to start believing the One Health concept and to get everyone involved in that concept to work together to fight the spread of infectious diseases. “Nature is very smart,” concludes Barreiro. And biotechnology works day in and day out, from the standpoint of animal and human health, to keep it from outsmarting the planet.

AseBio is part of the One Health Platform that was set up in November 2021 to promote this concept in Spain and contribute, as much as possible, to ensure health policies are aligned with this comprehensive approach the world needs today.

Among our members there are nearly 100 companies working in human health with over 773 open studies, and more than 10 focusing on animal health with at least 20 noteworthy lines of research under way. Check out the AseBio pipeline here. 

Photo: Unsplash