One of AgResearch’s top young scientists has pitched her presentation to potential investors whose commitment will launch a treatment for dealing with facial eczema.
Dr Tanushree Barua Gupta was the only New Zealander to claim an award in the Australasia-based AgriFutures growAG 2024 catalyst program, being recognised in the new research and product development section.
The award process has secured her a place in front of potential investors for the antifungal product she has been working to develop. It is capable of targeting facial eczema-causing fungal spores.
As a disease, facial eczema (FE) continues to blight many farms in the upper North Island. It is spreading thanks to climate change, and inflicts $330 million of damage a year on the animal production sector.
The disease is moving south through New Zealand as moisture and humidity levels rise, with some detections even occurring in the South Island. Australian researchers are also increasingly detecting it.
As a disease in livestock, it is a difficult one to manage, with its presence highly dependent up on the right climatic conditions to generate elevated spore counts.
Even then spore counting is not always a reliable indicator of its presence, with the toxin sporidesmin not always present in all the spores detected. This makes it an easy disease to either over or underestimate in terms of its prevalence at a certain time.
“And the spores have proven to be quite capable of evolving, responding to climate change and building resistance to treatments,” Gupta said.
Gupta’s work has involved identifying and isolating a naturally occurring, non-toxic and sustainable solution to a disease whose current treatments are anything but.
“There are chemical antifungal spray treatments available, but they are highly toxic, and inflict wider damage on the soil environment.”
The other option is to help build livestock’s ability to withstand FE’s toxic spores by dosing with zinc, itself a toxin that requires careful measurement and is difficult to administer in many situations.
Gupta is understandably coy on the source of her anti-FE fungal treatment, confirming it is from a previously unstudied, but naturally available source.
“It is recognised as already being safe and part of the natural ecosystem.”
Ultimately, in a commercial form she can see it being developed as a product that can be sprayed directly onto paddocks or even applied via irrigation.
“My main goal is to move right away from having to treat the animal in response to the fungi’s presence.”
Her discovery has come in part from “just being curious” about other sources of possible solutions in the everyday environment, linked to her background in dairy hygiene and microbiology.
“We spend a lot of time understanding the ‘bad’ things in the environment, they show up quickly, but there are compounds that could be easily available in nature , but because they don’t cause problems, we don’t always know much about them.”
Her microbiology work has included advanced diagnostics work using CRISPR based diagnostics to detect bacteria on farm and food matrices, understanding a plethora of different dairy related bacteria.
Making the step from deep within the microbiology lab to a full-on commercial pitch for investment is a big one for a scientist. Gupta admits she has some sense of trepidation accompanying the exciting prospect.
She is also buoyed by the prospect of helping farmers with a commercial, viable solution to a debilitating disease that for NZ’s entire livestock history has proven hard to deal with.
“The opportunity to really make a difference is what has always driven me and to be this close is exciting.”
Meantime Gupta is mixing stand-up pitch practices and presentation dry runs into her working day, in preparation for appealing to the right investor.
