A Singapore-based bioscience startup said Monday it’s setting up bird flu test labs on ships of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which operates in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Three-year-old Veredus Laboratories said the fleet will use its kit for rapidly detecting bird flu’s H5N1 virus, which has caused deaths in animals and humans in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The deal will enable the fleet to prevent avian flu outbreak or quickly contain one.

“With limited supplies of Tamiflu and no proven avian flu vaccine, having this capability is paramount to force health protection and will be critical in an actual pandemic,” Capt. Charles Baxter, surgeon for the Seventh Fleet, said in a statement.

The Seventh Fleet includes 50 ships, 120 aircrafts, and 20,000 sailors and marines.

The Navy, along with other branches of the military, wants to be able to quickly identify avian flu because the disease can spread rapidly. Because the fleet does dock at ports in various countries, sailors and marines who spend time on land can be exposed to bird flu.

“They are interested in testing everybody who comes back from the ship. By going from port to port, they can be carriers,” said Joanne Stephenson, vice president of business development at Response Biomedical, a diagnostic tool company in Burnaby, Canada. Response Biomedical is carrying out clinical trials for a bird flu kit that uses a nasal swab sample to determine the presence of the antigen, all within 15 minutes.

Veredus CEO Rosemary Tan has carried out training sessions on the fleet’s command ship, the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, on bird flu test procedures. Veredus, which is a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Companies in Asia, declined to disclose the financial terms for the deal.

The company’s H5N1 test, launched in August 2005, can determine the presence of a virus in RNA samples from humans or animals within hours. That’s faster than the days it often takes to confirm a deadly disease in clinical labs. Those types of tests require the specimens be sent to specialized labs.

“Molecular DNA analysis is quickly becoming accepted as a very specific, sensitive, and accurate detection method in viral infection,” Ms. Tan said in a statement.

Because bird flu has the potential to unleash a pandemic, the World Health Organization and governments around the world are demanding diagnostic tools that can be used in airports and healthcare clinics in rural areas to show accurate results in less than 30 minutes.

No such tests are available now, but large medical device companies, such as Roche, are developing such tests (see Finding the Flu).

The Flu Kit Market

Veredus is not the only company that has developed the bird flu kit. In fact, Veredus is competing with much larger and established competitors who also see lots of money-making opportunities in the global preparation for bird flu. Those competitors include AJ Roboscreen, based in Leipzig, Germany, and Qiagen in Venlo, The Netherlands.

Avian flu has yet to mutate to become easily transmittable from human to human, although there are 232 confirmed human cases, including 134 deaths, since 2003, according to the World Health Organization (see Death Watch and Fighting the Flu).

Those deaths typically involved contact between humans and diseased livestock. Most of the deaths occurred in Asia, where the Seventh Fleet sails.

Veredus, which has received $1 million in funding from investors including Huit Investments, is developing a test kit that can determine not only the bird flu but also the common, milder types of seasonal flu. The startup is developing this lab-on-chip and a portable reader with Geneva-based semiconductor company STMicroelectronics. The product is expected to launch early next year.

Contact the writer:UWang@RedHerring.com