When Leonard Moran returned home to Mayo in a taxi after 10 years working for the Medical Research Council in Britain, many people thought he was loaded. Why else would he have made the long journey west in a taxi?

In truth, he had lost all of his savings and the clapped-out taxi, which he had bought for about £290 when he was leaving Britain, plus a further £250 in his back pocket, were all he had to his name.

That was 30 years ago. Today Moran is a millionaire, having sold BioLabs - the company he helped found in Ballina, Co Mayo not long after returning from Britain - for €25 million in cash four years ago. As the largest shareholder, he received €8.75 million.

Today, he is on the cusp of a brave new venture. Since selling BioLabs to Massachusetts-based Charles River Laboratories, he has been working on the production of germ-free eggs and germ-free chickens - primarily aimed at producing eggs for the vaccine market.

For years, chicken eggs have been the primary substrate on which vaccines are developed. As vaccines are injected into humans, they are required to be clean. Invariably some contamination occurs at the egg stage. This has to be eradicated before vaccines are grown in the fertile egg, according to Moran, but cleaning the eggs is not totally foolproof and takes extra time and money.

Moran says his Mayo-based biotechnology company, Ovagen, has solved the problem and holds the worldwide exclusive patent for specialist techniques to derive germ-free eggs and birds. "We have broken the cycle of contamination. We are actually surgically removing the egg into a sterile chamber just before the egg is laid. We are then incubating that egg in a sterile container which we call an isolator. And they just reproduce.

"Now we rear them in germ-free conditions. From here on in, it no longer involves surgery."

Ovagen's goal now is to commercialise a large-scale supply of germ-free eggs and chickens, says Moran. He concedes it will be a very expensive business and the priority now is to get people to back him. The company has hired Goodbody Stockbrokers to seek investors to stump up an initial €100 million to get production up and running.

It is understood that a number of major international pharmaceutical companies have already expressed an interest in the technology.

"One hundred million will put us into production on a serious basis," he says. "We are looking at €300-€325 million in total investment. We are looking at close to a 1,000,000sq ft building and employing about 450 people."

Those are very high stakes but Moran says the market is worth about $4.4 billion (€3.3 billion) and Ovagen is looking to capture 20 per cent of the market for eggs for the vaccines within the first five years from the start of full production.

Germ-free eggs provide many advantages over current sources of vaccine production, but the key is security, which makes them more valuable. Avian flu is a major threat to the traditional production of vaccines, as laying flocks can be infected with bacteria and viruses.

Not only are the eggs suitable for vaccine production, but they are also suitable for therapeutic protein production for the treatment of diseases such as leukaemia and cancer, says Moran.

This will not be the first time that Moran has gone hunting for money to fund an idea. Raising cash is familiar territory for the biologist.

When he returned from London, he used the family farm as collateral to set up BioLabs, a contract testing and research company.

With many of the major pharmaceutical companies setting up in Ireland about 30 years ago, Moran saw a niche for their products to be screened by an internationally recognised toxicological laboratory before going on the market.

"I didn't have much funding - a bit of grab, borrow, steal, hassling the bank manager, and we finally got it going," he says.

BioLabs, which was built on the Moran family land near Ballina, expanded to employ 150 people, many of them graduates. The availability of well-trained staff is one of the reasons Moran continues to base himself there.

In 1994, to develop and expand, BioLabs raised further cash through the Business Expansion Scheme, with many members of the staff at the time investing in the company. When it was sold in 2002, they received more than 60 times the amount originally invested. "It was an out-and-out tremendous success," says Moran. "It was listed as one of the highest price/earnings ratios in the country at the time of the sale."

Similar returns can be expected from Ovagen if Moran's projections are anything to go by. The company's financial projections show net profits of $792 million (€596 million) at the end of five years.

With his track record to date and more than 40 product lines up and running in biotechnology over the past 20 years, it would be foolhardy to bet against Moran's ability to get his latest venture to fly.