Pig-cell trials likely to take six months

It will be at least six months before Living Cell Technologies confirms plans to build a $28 million pig-breeding unit to house 500 sows in Southland.

The company's chief operating officer Paul Tan, founding director David Collinson and founding and medical director Bob Elliot were in Invercargill on Wednesday to open the first of up to 80 hi-tech "pig palaces" the company plans to build. However, the trio said a decision on expansion in Southland depended on the success of their New Zealand clinical trails.

Health Minister Tony Ryall last month gave the company approval to transplant Auckland Island pig islet cells into eight severe type-1 diabetics to treat the disease. The clinical trials are to be carried out under strict conditions at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital and are expected to start within the next month. The company has already conducted successful trials in Russia. Professor Elliot said results from the New Zealand trials were expected to take six months to a year.

The company wants to base the breeding and cell harvesting of the disease-free Auckland Island pigs used in the transplants in Southland.

The company's first breeding unit, at a confidential location near Invercargill, took about two years to build and cost about $2.5 million. It will house 50 sows and was designed by Invercargill architect David Molliner and built by Cunningham Construction. Dr Tan said the company hoped to use the same architect and builder for its next units because it was a very complex building and "they know what they're doing".

The next unit would be a much larger building, housing 500 sows and employing up to 50 people.

Mr Collinson said potential economic benefits for Southland were enormous.

Rearing the pigs was labour intensive. Each unit would need 15 tonnes of sterilised grain feed a week, which the company hoped to source from Southland growers.

- © Fairfax NZ News