THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 30, 1996 TAG: 9605300365
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 78 lines
Cockroaches across America may soon be going on The Pill - and not for any burgeoning sexual revolution in the insect world.
Indeed, taking this pill will hardly lead to long nights of worry-free bliss between consenting roaches - it likely will kill them.
Virginia Tech received a federal patent this month for what is being billed as the first birth-control pill for cockroaches. (The advertising jokes are limitless - ``Roaches check in for a quickie, but they don't check out,'' is just one playful jingle.)
Actually, the pill is a powdery, nontoxic pesticide that, once swallowed by female or male roaches, blocks their metabolism of life-sustaining nitrogen and makes reproduction nearly impossible.
A Blacksburg company hopes to turn this biological invention into a $100 million over-the-counter breakthrough - one that controls crawly, prolific roaches without odorous sprays or unfriendly chemicals.
``This could signal a whole new technology'' in the nation's $4 billion-a-year pest-control industry, said Steve Banegas, president of Dominion BioSciences Inc., which is banking nearly $5 million on the product's future.
Banegas said researchers at Virginia Tech are trying to develop similar pills for other unwanted house guests, including termites and ants.
The pill's inventor, Heather Wren, is a South African native who has spent much of her professional life peering through microscopes at the innards of cockroaches, most recently as a research scientist at Virginia Tech. She said her years of meticulous work were inspired by a drive for safer, nontoxic alternatives to current bug sprays.
``I respect cockroaches,'' Wren said this week of her fascination with an insect that most people would rather see dead than skittering around their pantry. ``But I wouldn't invite one to lunch, that's for sure.''
More seriously,roaches can carry bacteria and disease on their legs and then transfer health problems by walking on human food, Wren said.
Formally known as Ecologix Cockroach Bait, the pill still must win approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticides.
But because it contains no toxic materials - only natural biochemicals, including one used to treat human gout - the EPA has placed the pill on a fast-track that could make it available in drug stores and supermarkets by 1998, Banegas said.
Projected to cost less than $10 per package, the pill would come as white powder stashed in a small, round tin. Inside its container, the powder is mixed with sweet-smelling food bits to which roaches flock. The bait would be set by homeowners under sinks, in cupboards or in other places likely to attract roaches.
``It looks like a mini fudge cake,'' Banegas said of his bait package, which already has passed laboratory and field tests. ``The roaches go nuts for it.''
Unlike a spray, which kills roaches immediately, the pill takes time to work. In field tests, it took about a week to see a decline in roach infestation and about six weeks to nearly vanquish a colony, Banegas said.
The pill's secret, Wren explained, is a deadly, dynamic effect that two common biochemicals - xanthine, found in coffee and potatoes, and oxypurinol, used to treat gout - have on roach metabolism when ingested together.
Roaches, Wren said, have a unique ability to store nitrogen in their bodies. When their diet is short of this crucial element, they can use their stockpile.
But the pill blocks nitrogen stockpiling, thus destroying a roach's ability to obtain nitrogen or pass it on to its eggs. While some eggs will hatch, baby roaches can't develop for lack of nitrogen.
``It's like if you ate and ate and ate, but you got no energy from your food,'' Wren said. ``You'd get thinner and thinner and die. That's what we see in roaches.''
Wren is not worried that her invention - which she calls ``the chink in the armor of an extraordinary species'' - will wipe out roaches. After all, she notes, they have been on the earth for 350 million years.
``They survived the dinosaurs,'' she said. ``I don't think we have to worry about wiping them out.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff grapgic by Joh Corbitt\The Virginian-Pilot
How the "Pill" Works
Source: Virginia Tech
KEYWORDS: COCKROACHES BIRTH CONTROL PILL NONTOXIC PESTICIDE by CNB