By Richard Jenson

We have all heard the shrieks of small children in the back room of the doctor's office. We feel for them, and we remember the pain we felt as we got our vaccinations.

Like them or not, we all need these shots. Vaccines have nearly wiped out polio and other deadly diseases in the United States.

Hyclone Laboratories in Logan plays a vital role in producing these vaccinations.

Hyclone, 1725 S. Highway 89-91, is the headquarters of the worldwide company. Hyclone has 562 employees in offices in England, Belgium, Sweden, China and New Zealand.

Recently, one of these employees tried to explain to a visitor what Hyclone does. He stated simply, "We make cell cultures."

Seeing the confused look on the visitor's face he continued in trying to explain what that meant. After a few minutes of confusing metaphors he passed the visitor along to the man in charge.

Leland Foster, chief executive officer and president of Hyclone Laboratories, gave the visitor the easy-to-understand version. He said to think of cell cultures as a "glorified grocery store," which provides food for animal cells to grow. A culture, or bottle full of serum to the rest of us, creates a closed environment to allow the cells to grow undisturbed. To create these cultures, Hyclone first collects cow blood as a byproduct of slaughterhouses. Hyclone lets the blood sit until it curdles and the serum separates from the rest of the clotting blood. The serum is then harvested and taken for filtering and purification.

"We dress up to protect the product from us . . . we're all walking bags of germs."

Once purified, the animal serum is mixed with a "powdered soup" as Foster calls it. The powder is made up of sugars, vitamins and carbohydrates, which adds more nutrients to the serum. This souped-up serum is then put in bottles and sealed; this is a cell culture. These cell cultures are similar to petri dishes except instead of growing bacteria they grow animal cells. These cells are usually infected with a disease, which is then studied or used for making vaccinations.

Hyclone does not study diseases or make vaccinations, it leaves that to researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Hyclone provides the first of several steps in studying diseases and creating vaccinations for them.

Cell cultures are essential for growing and harvesting viruses, explains Foster,

"You couldn't have a herd of humans running around that you put all these viruses into; you take the cells from the human and make the cells grow by themselves (in a cell culture)."

Researchers take the cell cultures and infect them with a disease such as polio and allow it to grow. They harvest a small portion of these infected cells, put them in a vaccine and inject them into the body. The body easily fights off these few infected cells and in the process becomes immune to a much larger dose of infection. It is like giving the body an easy practice-run against fighting a certain disease. When the body comes in contact with the full-blown disease, it will recognize it and know how to fight it.

Since Hyclone does not do any experimenting with diseases or viruses, its working environment is extremely safe. The workers do wear gowns, gloves, hairnets and masks, but surprisingly, it is not to protect them.

"We dress up to protect the product from us . . . we're all walking bags of germs," says Foster with a smile.

Another positive aspect of the cell culture production business is that it turns waste from the meat industry into a valuable resource. Foster says the term waste is only a point of view.

"They slaughter the animals to make hamburger so you can eat it at Wendy's, it just happens that they also have . . . blood that is valuable."

Hyclone actually competes and pays top dollar for this perceived waste.

Turning a waste product into a valuable resource sounds perfect but it does have a downside. Cost: One quart of animal serum can cost between $250 and $320. Unfortunately, one quart does not go very far for many researchers, most of them must purchase much more than that. Hyclone's largest serum container is a 1,000-quart single-use tank that costs several hundred thousand dollars.

Hyclone is the largest of six suppliers of animal serum in the world. Hyclone provides researchers, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies with the serum. Medicines, diagnosis and treatment of diseases are some of the additional uses of the cell cultures.

Toxicology is another area of research that Hyclone supplies cell cultures. By testing on cells cultures, many experiments on live animals could be eliminated.

For example, instead of putting a cosmetic in a rabbit's eye, researchers could experiment on cells in a bottle. Foster says this area or research is growing rapidly as people want to get away from animal testing. Foster supports the idea, saying it's a "very green kind of thing to do."

The toxicology department at Utah State University uses cell cultures to study cancer. Human lung cells are grown in cell cultures similar to Hyclone's, and then exposed to cancer, explains Terry Vanvleet, a graduate student.

"We [infect the cells] with a carcinogen and study what it does, how it binds to the DNA; if it causes mutations" says Vanvleet.

"Unfortunately," says fellow graduate students Kyle Watterson, "cancer is not a simple illness . . . you can't just kill it with a vaccine or an antidote." With this information Vanvleet, Watterson, and other students hope to discover the factors that lead to the cause and spreading of cancer.

Coincidentally, Hyclone started in a Utah State University lab doing work similar to that of the toxicology department. Dr. Rex Spendlove started Hyclone in 1967, when he was a professor at USU.

Spendlove was studying a viral disease that was plaguing children in many developing countries. At the time, the commercially available cell cultures were of such poor quality that they restricted his research. Spendlove developed his own cell cultures, which he purified to a quality that met his research needs.

Realizing the scientific world's need for high quality cell cultures, he started Hyclone. Spendlove, who is now Chairman of Hyclone, is responsible for many of the current techniques used in the cell culture production.

Apparently, cell cultures of this type had been around since the 1940s, but it had not been significantly improved, Foster explained.

"We took an old, forgotten, unimportant product and substantially improved its quality and usability," says Foster. "That's our claim to fame."

Foster says Hyclone will continue experimenting to improve its cell cultures. He says it aims to make animal serum that grows cells healthier and faster than ever before. The test that measures these qualities is called a cloning efficiency test. It measures the rate that the cells multiply or clone in the animal serum. A high clone rate is what they always shoot for.

Foster notes that the company's name Hyclone came from such a test.

"We claim that we can do it better than anyone else," Foster says.

He pauses and then adds, "Of course, that is also the claim of our competitors," he says with a smile.

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