Last month, employees Simon Liggett and Sara Ferguson bought the business to pursue its commercial interests. Mr Liggett’s father Graeme is also a shareholder.
DRL Ltd - originally Deer Research Laboratory, subsequently Disease Research Laboratory and, most recently, Disease Research Ltd - was established by Prof Frank Griffin in 1985 within the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Otago.
It has worked closely with veterinarians and farmers since then to develop and make available custom-diagnostic services.
Latterly, it moved from a university-administered laboratory service into an independent commercial entity under the management of Otago Innovation Ltd - a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of Otago - based in laboratory space at the Invermay campus.
In recent times, DRL’s stock in trade had been a test tailored for the diagnosis of Johne’s disease in farmed deer.
Before that, it was heavily invested in the development and application of a custom Tb diagnostic test for the deer industry. As a consequence, the incidence of Tb in New Zealand deer herds was reduced hugely.
When Prof Griffin was awarded the Pickering Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2010 in recognition of excellence and innovation in the practical application of technology, DRL’s efforts were credited with having saved the deer industry $90 million of production that would otherwise have been lost to Tb, yersiniosis and Johne’s disease.
Otago Innovation retained a 10% shareholding in the company, but that would be bought out within the next year by the other shareholders.
The company now worked predominantly in the deer and dairy industries and also did some work with goats.
About a year ago, the team realised more of their business was coming from commercial sources than research, Mrs Ferguson said.
The university suggested it look at the business and see how it could perform with or without research funding, and also commercially.
American-born Mrs Ferguson, who has been with the company for three years and is now operations manager, said it was a very good commercial business and the staff felt it should be given the opportunity to "move forward" - and they wanted to take it there.
For Simon Liggett, the laboratory manager who has been at DRL Ltd for the past 22 years, it was "just business as usual".
One of their biggest strong points had been their customer service and they had the ability, by being a small laboratory, to customise solutions for customers who came from all over the country, the team said.
