‘Bio-Bullets’ Poised to Hit the Big Time : Health: The BB-like bullets ease delivery of medicine to wild animals and free-range livestock.

Shooting “bio-bullets” at diseased big horn sheep wasn’t exactly what Fred Paul envisioned when he began tinkering with a new idea for BB guns.

As a researcher for 3M Co., Paul was experimenting with a “safe-shooting” water-filled BB when he casually splattered a shot on his office wall. “Suddenly it hit me. What I had wasn’t a gun. It was a long-range delivery device.”

Fifteen years and more than $8 million later, Paul’s privately owned Ballistivet Inc. is arming ranchers and wildlife veterinarians with guns that shoot soluble bullets packed with freeze-dried vaccines.

His aim is to have bio-bullets dominate syringes in the $1-billion vaccine sector of the animal health industry. The company also is targeting the $4-billion market of antibiotics, wormers, fertility drugs and other pharmaceuticals.

“This is a real Buck Rogers deal. It’s goofy,” said Dr. Jerry Swanson, veterinarian for Hitch Enterprises, a 160,000-head feed lot business in Oklahoma and Kansas. “But it’s really taking off. Pretty soon, every cowboy in the high plains will have one of these guns sticking out of his truck window.”

For now, the company has only 14 employees, controls less than 1% of the animal vaccine market and isn’t expected to make a profit until 1991.

But Paul, who extracted the technology from 3M in 1983, expects sales to triple this year to about 3 million bio-bullets. In addition, the company is moving to a new plant capable of making up to 100 million doses a year.

Swanson said the bio-bullet has distinguished itself by adding speed, comfort, dosage uniformity and sterility to the vaccination process. The units, fired rapidly from up to 50 feet away, penetrate flank muscles and dissolve.

Most important, Swanson said, bio-bullets spare cattle the stress of syringe inoculations since heavy handling can disrupt a bovine’s eating habits for up to three days.

Dr. David Jessup, wildlife veterinarian for the California Fish and Game Department in Rancho Cordova, said the patented invention has vastly improved the fight against a pneumonia-producing virus killing large numbers of lambs in a herd of big horn sheep ranging the Santa Rosa Mountains near Sacramento. “For us this is a godsend,” Jessup said. “Any alternative to having to catch animals is quite useful.”

Ron Eis, project manager of bio-production development at rival SmithKline Beecham Animal Health Products in Omaha, Neb., said bio-bullets are a well-crafted alternative to syringes when used on wild or unpenned animals.

“It’s not going to revolutionize the market, and I don’t think you are ever going to replace the syringe,” Eis said. “But it is quite quick and quite easy, and there is a niche in the market for that.”

In western Wyoming, game wardens are aiming bio-bullets at a herd of 22,000 elk to vaccinate against brucellosis, a bacterial disease that kills unborn elk.

“It’s the biggest wildlife disease program in North America,” said Tom Thorne of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “The Ballistivet gun is kind of the linchpin to the whole thing.”

The system also has been used on wild game in Africa and South America, but its biggest moneymaking potential is in the domestic 110-million beef cattle industry.

Paul and Ballistivet President Donald Sturtevant wouldn’t disclose sales projections, but their product now sells for 47 to 53 cents apiece, about four times as much as syringe doses.

Paul said 3M invested $2 million to $3 million to develop bio-bullets but decided in 1983 that they didn’t fit with its business. Instead of killing the project, 3M accepted royalties from Paul, who raised $500,000 in a private stock offering to form Ballistivet. A year later he kept the company alive by taking out a second mortgage on his hobby farm.

Since then, the company has raised $6 million in private stock sales and has avoided sizable bank debt. It is marketing the product through distributors who handle other veterinary products.