Norwood Abbey and AWI continue chemical mulesing program

Norwood Abbey (ASX:NAL) and Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) have signed an agreement to enter into phase II development of a non-surgical mulesing technology to prevent sheep flystrike using Norwood's needle-free injection technology.

The device will deliver AWI's collagenase to the sheep's breech area, causing the wool to fall out and inhibiting regrowth.

AWI will fund phase II of the development project which will occur in collaboration with AWI researchers at the Bioinstrumentation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

"AWI has a product which they can't get in, in an efficient way," said Norwood's senior VP corporate development Bernie Romanin. "We've got a device that obviously needs something to deliver so we put the two together."

A hand held working prototype of a needle-free drug delivery device has already been developed with preliminary trials on sheep showing that the collagenase penetrates the skin and providing equivalent results to conventional needle delivery. The prototype currently delivers a single injection, however the ultimate aim is to develop a device that covers a larger area with multiple injections, said Romanin.

The collaboration project, which has already been granted ethics approval, will develop the needle-free injector and test it on live sheep.

"This next phase of testing which is going to start in early September could well be completed within the month of September," said Romanin.

"The plan would then be to probably do the next phase here in Australia before the end of the year. Then to move into the regulatory phase which would probably be some time next year," he said.

The regulatory phase would be conducted on up to 1,000 sheep, said Romanin.

Subject to the success of further trials of both the protein and applicator, a final product could be commercially available in 2007.

And while the commercialisation arrangements between AWI and Norwood Abbey are yet to be finalised, Romanin said that: "If we met all the milestones and progress to the next phase, we'd probably enter a very traditional licensing agreement where we license the technology to AWI and share on the commercial return."

Currently, surgical mulesing is performed on approximately 15 million sheep a year and has been shown to prevent 90 - 100 per cent of cases of breech flystrike.