$2.5 million for new antibody technique

At North Dakota University, it was a flock of geese in the rural reaches of the upper Midwest that ended up attracting earmarked money from Washington, DC to Grand Forks.

A goose farm 64 kilometers west of the university was looking for something it could do with all the leftover goose blood it was accumulating. The goose herders sought help from researchers at UND, and in 2008 they got approximately $2.5 million in earmarked money from the Department of Energy, which went to UND biologist David Bradley, the university’s research foundation, and to a private company they ended up forming called Avianax.

With the help of the earmark, by studying antibodies in the goose blood Avianix claims that it has developed technology that can produce threefold more antibodies from goose eggs that can be made from chicken eggs (the standard practice),...