MANNING – Struve Labs, an internationally recognized pig research facility in Manning with a New Zealander as CEO, is a linchpin in a promising marriage of medicine and agriculture, one in which, among other things, pig organs can be transplanted into humans.

Specifically, Struve Labs, founded in the early 1960s as Merrick Labs, develops Caesarean-derived, colostrum-deprived – CDCD – pigs, animals that are not fed mother’s milk and are born and raised in an environment in which they are as free as possible from pathogens and disease.

“We’re raising the babies,” said Dr. Rexanne Struve, director of lab research in this western Iowa community thick with German heritage.

The lab has been intensely involved with providing organs from the specially raised pigs for cutting-edge research in the field of xenotransplantation – animal-to-human transplants.

Struve says that work continues in earnest.

Click below to read Burns’s full report on xenotransplantation, and read his insightful commentary on the subject here.

But now, Struve Labs, employing 16 people, is doing more contracting with companies interesting in obtaining blood from pigs that can be manipulated to offer vital insights and possible remedies for human disease and viruses.

“The business is about to break wide open, I think,” Struve said.

Struve also is considering moving beyond pigs and setting up subsidiaries in which some of the same science and Struve-developed processes are applied to cattle and horses.

“These will be mostly safety studies on vaccinations,” Struve said. “It won’t be just going to the next-door neighbor and buying their horses.”

The work with horses and cattle would be for animal, not human application.

Collectively, Struve’s ambitious plans are expected to lead to more high-paying, high-tech jobs for western Iowa (where Struve intends to locate as much of her growing science-ag venture as possible).

“We will be looking in the future to hire people with more experience than we may have in the surrounding area,” Struve said.

In the blood area, Struve is involved with Department of Defense-funded companies seeking to find responses for potential bioterrorism attacks.

“We need to be ready for attacks like that,” Struve said. “Companies are looking for ways to counteract them with anti-viral treatments. It has huge international possibilities down the road.”

But the truly exiting area for Struve is with organ transplants.

Research in xenotransplantation has opened major opportunities for Struve Labs to enter a highly lucrative marketplace, where human lives can be saved and small family farms, which would be needed to provide pigs, could flourish again.

In a very real way, Struve is intent on merging the culture of animal husbandry, and small stocks of the 19th century family farm, with freshly minted science from the new millennium.

Her bold ideas have drawn the interest of patent lawyers looking to lock in the process. At the same time, enthusiastic legislators and development leaders view Struve’s plans as possibly reshaping the economic landscape, turning a swath of western Iowa into the center of a perfect storm of change in agriculture and surgery.

As it stands the Struve pigs are sold to commercial laboratories, which primarily run government-mandated trials on vaccines before they can be released into the marketplace.

But these pigs, because of their relative purity, can be used for harvesting organs and other biological products – like the blood mentioned before – that have potential life-saving applications for human beings.

One emerging area that is the source of much anticipation in Struve’s field concerns the use of pig pancreas cells in humans – a process that, if effective, could halt the march of diabetes, a disease caused when a human’s pancreas, because of genetic predisposition, over-eating or other behavioral problems, can no longer secrete the insulin needed to process blood sugars.

“Diabetes is a huge issue,” Struve said. “We are going to have many young people, who have lived on diets heavy on soda and fast food, with adult-onset diabetes in a short time.”

Cells from the pancreas of one of Struve’s pigs could be introduced into humans through a relatively non-invasive procedure. A capsule would be placed under the skin of a person with diabetes and the medical device would assist a human pancreas is reacting properly to blood sugars.

Bill Te Brake, president and chairman of the board and a New Zealander, joined Struve Labs about two years ago to increase the company’s international profile.

Te Brake is the business development director for Massey University in New Zealand, the only school in that nation to have a veterinary college. About 30 percent of New Zealand’s gross domestic product comes from agriculture.

He envisions western Iowa as the global “center for herd development” of pigs used in cutting-edge medicine.

“They (transplant and other medical advances) may come upon us very quickly,” Te Brake said. “For us to fit in we need to be an internationally recognized laboratory.”

Right now, Struve Labs is a privately held company. Te Brake said it could evolve into a holding company with producer-investors, farmers who own a stake in it and provide the pigs for the research and medical use.

The intent is to keep the company private and with local investors as going public would diminish local control and interest, two of Rexanne Struve’s major goals.

“What I want to do is bring better jobs to western Iowa,” Struve said.