Mainers take aim at salmon virus Winterport firm joins race to find better vaccine

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WINTERPORT – The race is on.

Aquaculture needs a better vaccine for infectious salmon anemia, the flulike disease that has cost Maine’s salmon farms more than $11 million in recent years. A new company called Maine BioTek Inc. believes it can deliver such a vaccine.

Of course, the three-person Winterport company, founded last year by Sharon Clouthier and Eric Anderson, has more than a little competition.

Researchers worldwide are searching for a better solution to this disease, which has infected fish farms in Canada, Scotland and Norway, as well as here in Maine, costing the aquaculture industry hundreds of millions of dollars.

The major portion of Maine BioTek’s budget comes from state and federal grant money and the remainder from private investors.

Many other small research and development firms have been eaten up by large pharmaceutical companies that are throwing all kinds of money at the problem as they come to recognize how profitable the industry-standard vaccination could be.

“Whoever has it first captures a market,” said Clouthier, BioTek’s president.

“It would be huge,” said Steve Page, the environmental compliance officer at Atlantic Salmon of Maine in Belfast.

“The threat of ISA has been one of the obstacles that has prevented people from investing in Maine, and in salmon fishing in general,” Page said.

There is a handful of ISA vaccines on the market, but the current technology can’t give salmon farms the security that they need. Current vaccines can lose their effectiveness over a period of time, and it’s not possible to revaccinate fish once they’ve been released into the ocean pens, Page said.

The available vaccines cost between 6 cents and 8 cents per fish, which, with millions of fish to be treated, can be a major expense, he said, describing the ideal vaccine as one with longer-term effectiveness and a lower cost than its competitors.

Clouthier and Anderson, BioTek’s vice president, believe that they could have such a vaccine on the market within three to five years. Clouthier holds a doctorate in biochemistry, Anderson in genetics, and the two have worked in fish pathology since their student days.

First and foremost, finding a vaccine means understanding the disease, the scientists said during a recent interview.

Last year, Maine BioTek mapped the genetics of a strain of ISA taken from a Canadian outbreak.

“That was our steppingstone,” said Anderson.

Since then, they have observed how a fish’s immune system responds when it is exposed to the virus, and have learned that some salmon seem to develop a natural immunity – a reaction that, previously, had not been well-documented.

They also have developed a new, less expensive test that can determine whether a fish has been exposed to ISA using just a sample of its blood.

Now, Clouthier, Anderson and their only employee, senior scientist Jennifer Lowry, are working their way through dozens of potential approaches to the disease.

ISA is a natural ailment that began appearing in farmed salmon in Norway in 1984, then Atlantic Canada in the mid-1990s, and Maine in 2001. The disease is of the same family as influenza, and, like the human flu, it can rearrange itself into different strains, making it hard for scientists to develop a cure.

“They can shuffle around their genetic material,” Anderson explained.

ISA spreads easily though body fluids, particularly in densely packed aquaculture pens. Infected salmon are lethargic and often develop swelling and hemorrhaging of their internal organs, particularly the kidneys.

The disease also can be lethal, with as many as half of the fish in an infected pen dying. But there also have been cases where fewer than 5 percent of the fish in a pen are infected.

In both the United States and Canada, finding even a single ISA-infected fish in a pen can be disastrous for a company, as federal policies require the removal or destruction of entire pens when samples come up positive for ISA.

Perhaps someday, a well-vaccinated fish population will make such draconian policies unnecessary, Anderson said.

The company is pursuing several different types of ISA vaccine and developing dozens of prototypes. Since its creation, the company has had a test of a potential vaccine in progress, Anderson said.

“It’s nonstop,” he said.

Once a vaccine seems to have potential in the lab, Anderson and Clouthier continue their work at a Canadian government research facility in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

For each potential new vaccine, 1,500 fish isolated in tanks at the research facility are vaccinated, then exposed to the virus. The number of fish that are infected with the disease, and those that die over about a four-month period, are counted, then the experiment is repeated over and over to verify the results.

Finally, the most promising vaccines will undergo field tests on salmon in the Atlantic before being submitted to the government for regulatory approval.

The process is like a good game of chess, figuring out the intricacies of how a whole spectrum of genetically different fish respond to varying types and amounts of vaccine, Anderson said.

“Sometimes you’ll get lucky and develop a vaccine from a particular bug, and it will work [on the first try], and it’s beautiful,” he said.

More often, a marketable vaccine represents years of dead ends and frustration.

The first few BioTek vaccines to receive approval probably will be produced at an out-of-state facility, but, eventually, Clouthier and Anderson hope to build the sort of sanitary facility needed for vaccine production – both for ISA and a number of other fish diseases that the company is investigating – right here in Maine.

But even the best vaccine can’t eradicate ISA. This is a natural disease that has always been, and likely always will be, present in the environment.

“ISA didn’t just appear. It was around long before we were here,” Clouthier said.

No vaccine can be 100 percent effective, either for people or for fish, but Maine BioTek plans to work toward perfection for many years to come.

“Once you have a vaccine on the market, you can always improve on it,” Anderson said.