Annette Kleiser, co-founder and CEO of Dalan Animal Health
Animal health in road traffic
Dalan Animal Health is working to sell its bee vaccines to business beekeepers and governments – and possibly expand to other invertebrates.
From Amy Feldman, Forbes contributor
HHow do you vaccinate a honey bee? And will beekeepers care enough to do that?
Annette Kleiser has been coping with these questions since founding Dalan Animal Health in 2018. Five years after founding the startup, the federal government approved an oral vaccine developed by her team that’s to be fed by beekeepers worldwide to employee bees, who then pass it on they feed royal jelly to their queens. The result, oddly enough, is immunity for the queen’s offspring. Now she has set herself the goal of vaccinating as many bees as possible – and thus helping to guard not only the beehives, but in addition the plants they pollinate.
“We know that the loss of insects is dramatic for this world,” Kleiser said. “Without insects we cannot survive on this planet or anywhere else.”
The Dalan vaccine protects against a devastating bacterial disease aptly named American foulbrood, and Kleiser sees it as a primary step toward keeping the roughly 3 million honey bee colonies within the United States healthy. It just isn’t the one disease that bees can suffer from. About 50% of colonies and thousands and thousands of bees die every year from a wide range of diseases, including a nasty parasite called the Varroa mite, pesticide poisoning, inadequate nutrition and the stress of traveling across the country to pollinate plants. Those are devastating numbers for beekeepers: “Imagine a rancher losing 30 to 50 percent of his livestock every year,” said Matt Mulica, senior project manager on the Keystone Policy Center, which supports the Honey Bee Health Coalition. “How do you combat this?”
Kleiser and her team at Dalan Animal Health, based in Athens, Georgia, imagine that specially developed bee vaccines are a vital tool to maintain more bees alive and enable business beekeepers (who can have around 5,000 to 30,000 colonies). continuing to maneuver them across the country in order that they can live and pollinate crops like almonds, blueberries, cucumbers and apples.
“When you have an outbreak [of American Foulbrood]“The spores are so resilient that the recommended treatment is to kill all the bees and burn all the hives,” said Tom Chi, founding father of At One Ventures, who invested in a seed round value in the summertime of 2022, when Dalan took his vaccine of $3.6 million invested against American foulbrood through clinical trials. “It’s catastrophic if you understand it.”
Kleiser, who has a Ph.D. She studied neurophysiology on the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and discovered the research that will lead her to bee vaccines while working to assist universities convert academic work into businesses. During her visit to the University of Helsinki, she met Estonian biologist and zoologist Dalial Freitak, who had an unorthodox idea: injecting a queen with an inactivated bacteria to enhance the hive’s overall resistance to disease. Insects and other invertebrates do not have antibodies like humans and other mammals, so the standard method of constructing vaccines doesn’t work on them. “When I heard about the research, I asked myself, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this?’” Kleiser recalls.
“If someone halved their winter losses because of these vaccinated queens, it would spread like wildfire.”
Kleiser expanded on Freitak’s research from the university, then they developed a vaccine that’s added to the so-called “queen candy” for the queens’ servants, who then incorporate it into the royal jelly fed to the queen. The result’s that the queen’s larvae are vaccinated against the disease once they hatch.
The beekeepers are watching closely. “This is absolutely latest. I feel that is why it’s generated plenty of interest and excitement,” said Blake Shook, a business beekeeper in Leonard, Texas, who’s testing the brand new vaccine. And national governments have an interest, too: Kleiser said she is in talks with half a dozen countries in Asia, South America and Europe about purchasing the vaccine to guard their countries’ bees (she declined to call which countries). To date, it has raised $14 million in enterprise funding from At One Ventures and Prime Movers Lab. Despite being a young startup with lower than $1 million in revenue, Kleiser is optimistic that she will secure large contracts with each governments and business beekeepers next yr.
But there’s one big hurdle: convincing beekeepers that the $10 cost per vaccine is value it. “Everyone is interested,” Shook said Forbes. “But it’s expensive and beekeeping isn’t exactly a high-margin business.”
Russell Heitkam, whose company Heitkam’s Honey Bees is a serious queen producer (he sells about 75,000 queens annually), said his customers are actively trying to know the economics and value of vaccinations. For a business beekeeper with 30,000 hives, the fee of vaccinating $10 per queen quickly adds as much as about $300,000. Heitkam, who’s working with Dalan on trials of the vaccine, said Forbes He would love to see evidence that the vaccines cause each bee colony to grow more densely with healthy insects that may produce larger amounts of honey and perform more pollination. Dalan argues that the fee of vaccination can be greater than offset if fewer bees die and healthier bees survive. But Heitkam and other beekeepers want the vaccine to guard against greater than just American foulbrood, which business beekeepers can partially prevent through higher beekeeping practices, comparable to: B. no sharing of kit between bee colonies and careful cleansing of hive tools.
“People call me and say, ‘Hey, I want to get some queens, should I get them vaccinated?'” he said. “An average queen costs $28, and now you want to add another $10 on top, so you need to be able to monetize that $10.”
But he points out: “If their vaccine can produce another frame of bees at the time of pollination, that will pay for itself.” A frame is the movable a part of the hive and might typically hold 2,000 to 2,500 bees.
Chris Hiatt, a business beekeeper with Hiatt Honey and president of the American Honey Producers Association, adds, “In beekeeping, it’s word of mouth. If someone halved their winter losses because of these vaccinated queens, it would spread like wildfire.”
This only applies to a bee disease. Dalan’s researchers are studying whether its vaccine can provide protection against other diseases, particularly a very harmful virus called deformed wing virus. So far, experimental trials in 400 business hives have shown this to be the case 83% reduction within the concentrations of a highly transmissible variant of the virus. “Anything above 65% to 70% is considered an effective treatment, and we are well above that,” said investor Chi.
The next step is to expand beyond honeybees to other invertebrates, starting with shrimp. “It was clear to me from day one that this was the solution not just for one insect, but potentially for all invertebrates,” said Freitak, the corporate’s scientific co-founder.
Like beekeeping, shrimp farming – a $40 billion market – suffers double-digit losses from disease yearly, despite relying heavily on the usage of chemical pesticides that pose a heavy burden on the environment. “There are billions of dollars in losses and shrimp production is growing and has a major impact on mangroves due to the chemicals used in shrimp farming,” Kleiser said.
Because the immune system of shrimp is analogous to that of bees, she believes Dalan could vaccinate maternal shrimp in an identical technique to queen bees. The company has begun testing vaccines against a typical shrimp disease called white spot syndrome virus, starting with small shrimp after which once they are large enough for business sale. The company said it’s beginning to see promising results with a survival rate of 64% in initial testing at an aquaculture research facility. “Everything has failed in the field with shrimp,” she said. “We believe our approach is different enough to give us a chance to capture the market.”
If a vaccine works on bees and shrimp, what else could it do? In the long term, Kleiser believes that even mosquitoes, that are known to transmit diseases comparable to malaria and dengue to humans, may very well be vaccinated, which would scale back outbreaks worldwide. As climate change increases the danger of formerly tropical diseases spreading north, the power to vaccinate insects could ultimately be as necessary for human health because it is for food security.
“It’s much, much larger than the honey bee,” Kleiser said. “The honey bee is big because we need this animal to survive, to feed us, but the science that is unfolding is much bigger.”
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