Gregg Hoffmann In-Depth: Watertown lab sees niche for CWD, Mad Cow test

By Gregg Hoffmann

WATERTOWN – If you’re a deer hunter, you’d like to quickly know that the buck you bagged is free of chronic wasting disease (CWD).

If you raise beef, you need to know as soon as possible if that downed cow has bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease).

Don Meyer, president of TSE Scan and Rock River Laboratory, hopes he has a new, quick, rather inexpensive test for both those diseases, plus scrapie in sheep.

All three diseases are forms of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a mouthful of vowels and consonants that will be referred to as tse from here on out. TSE will be reserved for Meyer’s company, which is a spin-off company from Rock River Lab.

CWD has affected deer hunting, a major social and economic event in Wisconsin. A recent study that showed the disease can be transmitted via soil and decomposing carcasses adds even more importance to the TSE work.

And recently, a single case of Mad Cow Disease has thrown a scare into the U.S. beef industry. In England, Mad Cow became rampant a few years ago.

Meyer uses Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, a machine manufactured by Thermo Electronic Corp. in Madison, to scan for molecular differences in tissues, deer lymph nodes and cattle brains. Diseased tissue shows up differently than healthy tissue.

“Light is reflected off every molecule and absorbed by every molecule differently,” Meyer said. “Diseased and non-diseased tissues have different spectral-fingerprints.”

There are other tests for the diseases. One test produces results in about five hours. Most take 5-10 days and must be done in a lab. The average cost is around $40.

Meyer’s test takes about a minute and should cost around $10. It could be done at deer registration stations.

“It’s a relatively easy procedure, and we hope to make it even easier,” said Meyer, who has a degree from UW-Milwaukee in geography. He has owned and operated Rock River Laboratory since the mid-1970s. His lab tested 80,000 samples of soil and 60,000 samples of feed last year, from all over the world. It employs 25 people.

“I started it out of a converted three-car garage on my parents’ farm near here, and it kept growing,” said Meyer, who runs both Rock River Lab and TSE Scane from a new facility in an industrial park, just south of Watertown.

Meyer became interested in applying some of the methodologies and testing equipment to tse tests when an employee, who was an avid hunter, told him how big of a threat CWD could pose.

“I wasn’t a hunter, so it didn’t mean that much to me at first,” Meyer admitted. “But, then I saw some parallels to what we were doing, and how many people could be affected.”

Meyer began testing his scans in 2002. He has had two setbacks, in part due to how tissue samples are stored and in part because he was using “near infrared” techniques first, before ratcheting them up to “mid-infrared.”

The Department of Natural Resources has been supportive and cooperative, according to Meyer. He has tested his scans with tissues from the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Madison. Meyer’s tests also were sent to the USDA lab in Pullman, Wash., and proven to be accurate.

TSE Scan expects to do more testing in summer and apply for certification from the USDA. If that happens, the company could be doing the tests by the 2004 deer hunting season.

Tissues that test positive for CWD with the TSE Scan method would very likely also go through the “gold standard” test of immunohistochemistry.

“The method is in early enough stages that we don’t know if it will end up creating CWD diagnostics yet,” said Julie Langenberg, a wildlife veterinarian with the DNR. “We have been working with Don for two years, so we obviously feel it has potential. He is committed to the work on CWD.

“We also work with other researchers both at the university and in private companies. As is the case with any new and different technology, it takes time.

“If it works, the relative quick time frame of Don’s method would have potential for providing a screening tool in the field.”

TSE Scan holds a patent for the method. Mad Cow also is included in the patent, but Meyer has to go to England to test for that disease, since the USDA has very few, if any samples.

Meyer made one trip to England earlier this year and will return in June to do tests there. “We’re doing the work in England in a three-phase approach,” Meyer said. “First will be to prove the concept with Mad Cow Disease that we have proven already with chronic wasting disease. That would be that we can tell the difference between diseased and non-diseased tissue using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrocity.

“If we can show with 95% accuracy that the method works with the first 50 samples, then they will give us another set of samples that will be 100 positive and 100 negative. If we can go from there, and keep that level of accuracy, then we’ll go for certification.

“I’m thinking that Phase 1 and 2 will happen in June, when we are there. Phase 3 is a little bit more difficult because they have to get 1,000 samples of tissue. They’re going to have to go pretty deep in their archives to get enough positive tissues for us to test. It may mean returning to England sometime later in summer to do that work.”

Meyer expects that TSE Scan could get certification for the Mad Cow Disease test in England before it gets approval in the U.S. However, English certification could help the company lobby the USDA for certification here.

Over time, Meyer hopes he can develop tests, perhaps using blood samples or urine that will not require tissues from a dead anima. But, to this point, it is not believed the tse diseases show up in such samples.

Nobody is paying Meyer to do these “practice” tests. He estimates the quest has cost TSE around $100,000 so far. He has been joined in the TSE venture by his son, Zach, a student at UWM, his daughter, Lauren, who is at Edgewood College, and his nephew, Matt Gaynor. The employees of Rock River Laboratory have remained primarily working on the “bread and butter” of the company – those soil and feed tests.

But, they eventually could become more involved with TSE work. Meyer believes there is great business potential in it.

“All the other tests out there are very heavy into chemistry,” Meyer said. “Operators have to be trained in histotechnology and other specialties. Most of them take days. IDEXX has a new one that takes four to five hours.

“If you come to a registration station in the eradication zone with a deer, and the DNR will take the head off the deer and give tissue to me for a sample, we will be able to let the hunter know within a minute whether his deer is positive or negative.”

Meyer said he does not want to mislead anybody at this point. “It is not imminent that this is going to be adopted by the DNR,” he said. “We need to go through the certification process before the DNR can use it.

“We will need to go through the certification process in England and in the U.S. for Mad Cow. We do feel there is great potential in this method.”