Local company finds ways to fight disease worldwide

By Gary Raham
North Forty News

Wildlife biologist Richard Poché became fascinated with elephants as a young researcher in the '70s. Yet after volunteering for the Peace Core and serving in African game parks, it became obvious that the big animals were not always the most dangerous.

Virtually every game ranger he worked with had lost a child to Lassa fever -a viral infection transmitted by a kind of rat.

After his stint with the Peace Corps, Poché worked as a biologist in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Burma and saw similar devastating levels of infectious disease. He eventually turned the main focus of his attention away from elephants and other big game and toward rats.

"Some of my colleagues thought that was a step down," said Poché recently, with a wry smile.

But that change of focus has brought Poché and his fellow researchers at Genesis Laboratories, located north of Wellington, much greater understanding of how to effectively control certain kinds of infectious disease in ways that minimize detrimental environmental impacts. The key to this success has been to understand in detail the life cycles of disease organisms and their hosts.

Money to fund such studies has traditionally been scarce, but because American servicemen now contract nasty diseases like Leishmaniasis in Iraq, the Department of Defense has made contract money available, as has the Centers for Disease Control. The Gates Foundation also makes important contributions to this long-neglected problem.

Tiny protozoans infect humans to cause several versions of Leishmaniasis, a disease that either eats away internal tissues or causes ugly skin lesions. Hundreds of thousands of cases are reported in India alone each year with thousands of deaths.

Leishmaniasis impacts mostly rural populations in 47 countries in Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean and China. The protozoans complete their life cycle in the sand fly and transfer to various mammals, like sand rats and humans, when the fly takes a blood meal.

Other diseases also have arthropod vectors. Ticks transmit Lyme disease, for example, and fleas transmit plague. The problem with killing off intermediate rodent hosts is that it leaves hungry arthropod vectors that may then be more likely to bite humans that show up near empty burrows or other rodent hide-outs.

Genesis Lab's approach, now bearing positive results, is to target the vector as well as the rodent host. They have developed baits containing insecticides that circulate in the rodents' blood and zap the insect carrying the disease microbe.

Vector biologist David Miller described the overall research assault on Leishmaniasis while tending to a small population of sand rats used in the research.

"The first step is proof of concept," he said. In other words, researchers have to show that the rat will eat the bait and that the insecticide will pass through to the sand flies and kill them.

The sand rat turned out to be a dietary challenge. When the sand rats ate conventional rat diets they almost instantly acquired a type of diabetes, so they must be fed special mixtures and their blood routinely tested for sugar levels. This side issue was not all bad. Other scientists are now using the rats to see if their odd metabolism can shed light on diabetes in humans.

The second step in the research process involves conducting tests in the field to see if rats will prefer the bait to other food choices in their own habitat. Next year Genesis will carry out tests in Israel. Once proven field effective, follow-up studies showing whether local human populations show lower infection rates will validate the overall effectiveness of the procedure.

Miller said that vaccine development is often the first thing people think of when attacking a disease, but vaccines are not always totally effective. "Vaccines are not the answer to everything," said Miller. "We need to break the cycle of disease transmission."

Miller is now one of many researchers who participate in the work of Genesis Labs-a venture that has been located in Wellington for nearly 20 years.

Poché met his wife, Linda, while in the Peace Corps and they started Genesis Labs in 1989. Poché cites the strong agribusiness and agri-research operations nearby as enticements to locate here. Colorado State University's Horticultural Research Center and Agricultural Research, Development and Educational Center are close by.

In addition they founded Richland Foundation/Invasive Species Management, a 501(c)(3) organization "to use their expertise and experience to aid and assist those in need and for the conservation and protection of endangered and threatened species and ecosystems that are pressured by the presence of invasive species."

A map on the Genesis Labs web site at www.genesislabs.com/experience_1.html shows an impressive array of local and international clients and research projects. There's a photo of an elephant on the web site, but rats still take center stage in an ongoing campaign to understand and defeat debilitating infectious diseases.