Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

International momentum is gathering fast behind a Cambridge technology as groundbreaking trials on three continents near completion for a product that has the potential to save industry billions of dollars every year.

The first industrial scale deployment of BioBullets Ltd's environmentally competent antidote - also called BioBullets for the plague of the zebra mussel is already underway with a UK water company taking up the technology having completed preliminary trials earlier this year.

Though the water firm is as yet unnamed, it follows the completion of tests with Thames Water and Anglian Water, who are both looking for alternatives to chlorine-based control techniques.

In the US, the Fish and Wildlife service is driving an all-out campaign to halt the zebra mussel's spread westwards past the mid-America 100th meridian and has convinced BioBullets to test the product outside the closed pipe systems where it normally operates and conduct open water trials.

The clamour for a solution for similar pests - such as golden mussels - is also coming from South America and BioBullets is working on variations of its technology so that it can target other species.

The zebra mussel, whose origins lie in Eastern Europe, is quickly becoming one of the world's biggest environmental and ecological pests, clogging the water systems of power plants, water treatment facilities, irrigation systems and industrial water intake structures.

BioBullets says that since arriving in the North American Great Lakes in the 1980s, zebra mussels have become a major biofouler, blocking the raw water cooling systems of power stations and water treatment works and costing $1-5 billion per year.

This invasive freshwater mussel colonises just about all types of solid surfaces including intake pipes and filter screens and is expanding rapidly due to a tremendous reproductive capability, the planktonic nature of the larvae allowing water currents to cause downstream drift over great distances and ability to attach to boats traveling within and from infested waters.