Dan Casey
In August a year ago, this column peered into the potential future intersection of biomedical research and Southwest Virginia agriculture.
It raised a dazzling prospect: One day in the future, the rolling farmland of Carroll and Grayson counties could be producing revolutionary crops. Those are replacement kidneys, hearts, livers and other organs to save the lives of mortally ill humans.
A daylong conference Wednesday at the Blue Ridge Crossroads Center in Galax brought that vision one step closer to reality. The nonprofit Blue Ridge Plateau Initiative brought together farmers, scientists, medical technology companies, government officials, academics and financiers.
The meeting’s purpose was to introduce people in the Blue Ridge Plateau region to the concept of specific pathogen-free sheep, aka SPF sheep, and how those could be a boon to the region’s economy.
People are also reading…
Former Sears at Valley View Mall on cusp of 4-year vacancy
Cave Spring High School givesRonde Barber a ‘pretty cool’ honor
Roanoke council approves rezoning for first-of-its-kind Goodwill grocery
Glenvar’s Brody Dawyot claims Roanoke Times Player of the Week honors
SPF sheep sell for roughly $3,400 per head, compared to the $200 or so a sheep would be worth in the meat market. And that kind of dollar spread gets attention from farmers and agricultural officials.
The animals are specially bred and raised to be free from 54 common livestock illnesses. The company that produces them in New Hampshire, New England Ovis, bills the sheep as the world’s healthiest.
It’s owned by two veterinarians, Richard and Julie Hurley, who’ve spent 18 years fine-tuning the breeding and raising processes of SPF sheep.
The animals’ health is what makes them especially valuable to medical researchers. Not infrequently, scientists have to cancel animal studies already underway when animals become sick. By eliminating most of those variables, SPF sheep greatly reduce the chances of a study beig shut down halfway through.
But the really big excitement is focused on the not-too distant future, perhaps five to 10 years down the road. Those same SPF sheep could be a source of customized organ replacements for humans.
Scientists have developed techniques to decellularize animal organs, which leaves translucent collagen husk known a “ghost organ.”
The ghost organs can be recellularized with human stem cells from a patient who (for example) needs a kidney. That replacement kidney won’t be rejected by its human recipient, because it was crafted with the patient’s own cells.
That’s a huge advance compared to human-organ transplantation, which usually requires transplantees take powerful anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.
galax conference
Roughly 30 people from academia, state and federal government, the finance sector and Carroll and Grayson county farmers attended a conference Wednesday to learn more about specific pathogen free sheep, and the impact they couldhave on Southwest Virginia agriculture.
Dan Casey
Virginia Agriculture Secretary Joseph Guthrie moderated the conference. He was there in furtherance of the agency’s mission to promote economic growth and development of Virginia agriculture.
“Certainly, the value added to specific pathogen free sheep that provide for life-saving and life-enhancing improvements for people through regenerative medicine can be a way of adding that value,” Guthrie said afterward.
“The results for people can be extraordinary, like helping to provide a new ear to a wounded veteran or providing the tissue for a heart transplant,” Guthrie said. “We are interested in having more discussions and learning more about how this new venture can enhance agriculture in Southwest Virginia.”
Also on hand (via video links) were officials from Bectin Dickinson and Co., which sells medical devices and technology around the world, and OviGenex, a California company that markets collagen and animal-derived biopharmaceuticls. It’s one of New England Ovis’ biggest customers.
Among the 30 or so others present were Richard McFarland, a medical doctor and academic who’s chief regulatory officer for the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, and Richard Hann, the technology integration officer for the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University.
WFIRM, about a 90-mile drive from Galax, is the largest organization of its kind in the world and is considered the international leader in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS Feed | Omny Studio
Unfortunately, the conference wasn’t hitch-free. Danny Boyer, president of the Blue Ridge Plateau Initiative, was sidelined because of COVID. An official from the University of Virginia’s Laboratory for Regenerative Therapeutics had to bow out due to a critical illness in his family. And a Virginia Tech official who was on the agenda had wreck involving a deer on his way to Galax.
In the bigger picture, conferees were envisioning much more than a handful of sheep farms in Carroll and Grayson counties. For example, farms that raise SPF sheep will have to be bio-secure facilities. That requires fencing technology to keep all other critters out of an SPF sheep farm. Any outside animals could infect the SPF sheep.
Could Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering provide such technology? Maybe.
Spf lambs
A “cuddle puddle” of 3-week-old lambs. In 2017, dozens of specific pathogen free (or SPF) were surgically delivered in Virginia and shipped to New Hampshire as part of a successful pilot project. The sires and dams of these lambs came from four Virginia sheep farms in Grayson County.
Courtesy of Julie Hurley
Humans who interact with the sheep indoors have to wear biohazard suits to prevent human-to-ovine disease transmission. And all SPF sheep are delivered by Caesarian section, to keep the lambs from becoming infected duing birthing.
That’ll require a small army of veterinarians, or perhaps veterinarians-in-training, from places such as Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, and workforce training.
Organizers at the conference believe they could pull off the SPF sheep endeavor in Virginia with $15 million to $20 million. They don’t have that money yet, which is one of the reasons for last week’s conference.
One of the presenters was Jack Wall, co-owner of a Floyd company called SWVA Biochar. It markets purified carbon produced from wood waste in giant kilns. One of biochar’s many uses is as bedding material in chicken houses. Chickens raised on biochar bedding are bigger and healthier than other chickens, he said. Wall can envision similar applications with SPF sheep.
The challenge, Wall noted, is that currently, “nobody’s committed any money whatsoever.”
“We have a nonprofit [the Blue Ridge Plateau Initiative] that’s all made up of volunteers. We don’t even have a buildig,” Wall said.
Carl Knoblock, a U.S. Small Business Administration official, said the organizers’ chief challenge right now is they’re pitching sheep, an investment unlikely to attract big money interests.
“Pitch what the impact is going to be,” Knoblock exhorted the conferees. “Millions and billions of dollars and jobs that are created from these sheep … This is going to be a global product.”
Knoblock told me afterwards, “I think if they change their pitch deck, they’ll get the capital.”
“Southwest Virginia is a natural place for this innovative venture with our excellent grazing for sheep, a College of Veterinary Medicine nearby at Virginia Tech, and the close proximity of great medical research at places like Wake Forest University and the University of Virginia,” Guthrie said. “We are interested in having more discussions and learning more about how this new venture can enhance agriculture in Southwest Virginia.”
Mikael Pyrtel, a senior partner at New England Ovis, said the mot important aspect of Wednesday’s meeting was that it brought together a diverse array of different people and organizations that are all interested in the SPF sheep applications in regenerative medicine.
“This is a consortium in its early phases,” Pyrtel said. “That’s one of the reasons this meeting is so important. We’ve got academia, government officials, the finance sector, and the private sector here for a concentrated period of time.
“What we heard and saw was a lot of potential partners,” he added.
Dan Casey (540) 981-3423
dan.casey@roanoke.com