VIENNA, Jan 9, 2008 (AFP) - Austrian authorities are investigating a Vienna-based laboratory that the World Anti-Doping Agency suspects of supplying so-called 'dry blood' to athletes for doping purposes, the health ministry said Wednesday.

'A request from WADA has been sent to the Interior Ministry and to the various bodies concerned and an investigation is underway,' a spokesman for the state sports secretary Reinhold Lopatka told AFP.

The comments, by Lopatka's spokesman Roland Achatz, confirmed a report in the daily Kurier, which printed a copy of a letter from WADA to the minister.

'We have recently been informed by reliable sources that a company called 'Human Plasma' is operating from Vienna,' stated the letter, which was signed by WADA President Richard Pound and dated November 23, 2007.

'According to our information, this company processes blood in order to prepare 'dry blood', which can then be re-injected as opposed to be transfused.'

And it continued: 'Our sources indicate that there are good reasons to believe that, in particular, this company supplies athletes who are re-injecting blood for doping purposes.'

The daily Kurier said that 'a large number of athletes' from the ski-ing and cycling world regularly turned up at the laboratory outside regular opening hours, such as early Sunday morning.

The newspaper said that one of the lab's managing partners, Lothar Baumgartner, was totally shocked when confronted with the letter.

Baumgartner was quoted as dismissing the allegations as 'total nonsense', insisting that the laboratory did not produce any blood cells.