Auckland BioScience’s new MonteSera facility in Parque de las Ciencias of Uruguay. Photo: SUPPLIED/Auckland BioSciences
While animal blood might make some people squeamish, a New Zealand company putting it "to very good use" in the pharmaceutical industry is now expanding into South America.
Auckland BioSciences manufactures and exports animal-derived serum and plasma from mostly cattle and pig carcasses raised in Aotearoa. It is used in medical and life science research, including in the development of veterinary vaccines.
Serums are collected from animal blood, filtered, tested, and then used as a medium for cultivating viruses and cells to develop vaccines.
The firm has invested $4 million into the new sterile filtration site in partnership with major firm Montesera at Uruguay's free-trade zone, Parque de las Ciencias - adding to its Tāmaki Makaurau home and another site in Brisbane.
In Uruguay, a team of a dozen staff will process and export South American-origin animal serum with capacity to filter up to 250,000 litres of animal blood each year.
Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard with Uruguayan president Yamandú Orsi in Uruguay. Photo: SUPPLIED/MP Andrew Hoggard
Its freezer will be able to store up to 70 tonnes of serums, worth about $10m in inventory.
Company director and chairperson Gary Paykel said it will be about five times the size of its Auckland site and provided more choices for its pharmaceutical customers.
"It will enhance our reputation worldwide and offer a choice. We can say to them, we can supply you from a country that's free of mad cow disease, free of foot and mouth and we know that the product is of the highest quality, or we can supply you from our Australian plant or South American."
He said the company had come a long way in the past 12 years from starting out of a container with carcass supplies coming from an Ōtāhuhu abattoir.
"Only New Zealand product here, cattle and pigs, we use quite a bit of porcine blood, that's used amongst other things for human eye drops.
"So it's really a resource that was not used at all or wasted, if you like. Now it's being put to very good use."
From left to right: Auckland Bioscience's Joyce Wang, William Gu, Daniel Maxwell, William Lee (also MonteSera) and Uruguay President Yamandú Orsí. Photo: SUPPLIED/Auckland BioSciences
Paykel said it had a range of interested suppliers which it will assess for quality and supply chain.
Major beef producer South America produced about a quarter of the world's beef, driven by Brazil.
Uruguay, a country of just under 3.4 million people, led efforts to improve traceability of cattle from farm to plate over the past few decades.
Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard, New Zealand Ambassador to Uruguay Kathryn Beckett, and Uruguay president Yamandú Orsí President were at the opening of the site in late October.
Hoggard said on Facebook, the plant was "the largest New Zealand investment in Uruguay".
Paykel said New Zealand's role in life sciences and biotechnology globally had grown in recent years.
"We are very much part of a global biotech infrastructure, New Zealand is playing a growing role in the whole life sciences industry, actually."
Auckland BioSciences exports to 18 countries including the European Union, the United States, Japan, Brazil and India.
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