Bioquell looks to quell SARS virus by Piper Terrett

The biotech minnow thinks it might be able to help iradicate the deadly virus.

Biotech baby Bioquell says it may be able to rid Hong Kong of the Sars virus, currently crippling the Chinese economy and fast becoming a pandemic. Its shares are up 1.2% to 78.5p.

The company has a market cap of just 30 million manufactures laboratory decontamination products and is launching its bio-decontamination service today. Bioquell claims its technology can kill off all manner of unpleasant bugs including anthrax, antibiotic resistant hospital acquired superbugs such as MRSA and possibly even Sars.

Sars is believed to be a member of the Corona virus family, which is relatively easy to kill, says chief executive Nick Adams. Were in discussions with people in Asia but the last thing I want to do is overstate anything and were not trying to profit from the Sars debacle. They still dont quite know what Sars is but if you look at the list of bugs our technology has killed experts believe it should deactivate Sars. We are cautiously optimistic.

Bioquell is targeting various markets for its new products including pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as the bio-defence and healthcare customers. It aims to provides services to companies on a retainer basis and says it is in discussions to franchise the products abroad.

Conventional bio-decontamination technology uses chlorine dioxide to fumigate buildings but is expensive, destructive as it spontaneously explodes in air at low concentrations and can leave behind poisonous residues. Chlorine dioxide was used to decontaminate the Hart building in the US senate contaminated by anthrax spores in November 2001.

However according to Bioquell it cost $25 million to clean up - $8 million to replace fixtures damaged by the gas took 5 months to complete and left employees suffering from chlorine dioxide poisoning. Bioquell claims its technology can clean an average-sized board room of bugs in 4 hours. It uses hydrogen peroxide vapour, which it says is residue free and does not destroy fixtures and fittings.

The company has patents surrounding its technology but is currently facing litigation from US competitor Steris, which claims Bioquell has infringed its patents. In Bioquells final results out today the company says it has been advised by its US patent lawyers that the case is without merit and it will be vigorously defending the lawsuit.

Final results saw pre-tax losses widen to 2.5 million from 1.3 million last year but the company says it is approaching break even and has cash of 2.2 million which includes a 2 million bank facility to fund its new service. Shares rose 1.2% to 78.5p.


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no interest in the share volume though, I thought there might have been?

me too?

i see ETQ dropped this morning, maybe there cure is not what was thought