Prof Richard Fry Interview Part 1
Prof Richard Fry (L) and Mark Barnett (R) commencing Angus Cattle IVF
Mark Barnett - BarnettAngus
The following is our exclusive interview with Dr Richard Fry from Speedbreed in Geelong. Richard is a global leader in research associated with IVF.
To provide some context, Richard has frozen 100's of embryos produced from our Donor cows and we, together with a team of people embarked on the implantation process recently.
As it happened we synchronised a large herd of recipients just before the recent Covid lockdown in Victoria. We were unsure if Richard and our mainland team members could get clearance to make it to Tassie in time.
It's all a bit tricky asking the recips to hold off for a week or so while we convince the Government to enable our team to travel, so you can imagine the stress levels escalated, but thankfully the day before D-Day the team got clearance.
The coming conversation was recorded between Richard and myself after two days of implanting as we explore the virtues of IVF. They happened to be the wettest two days of the year with horizontal rain being a consistent experience.
Farming is unpredictable and we learn to roll with the punches and do our best. We've broken it into a three-part conversation for your digestion.
I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did.
Mark
Well, Richard, here we are, by the fire, which is rather lovely in this beautiful old shearing quarters. The last couple of days, we couldn't have picked it worse from a weather point of view. But we got through and we've done very well.
150 or so recipients have now got embryos in them. And we've got a whole bunch more to do. But it was a fabulous couple of days. Let's talk about for a minute IVF, and the differences between IVF, and what most people would understand is Mullet ET work. I just want to explore it, unpack it a little bit and see where IVF is going. Because you've been working on the IVF scenario for three decades?
Richard Fry - Speedbreed
That's pretty right since about 1992.
Mark
1992. And you've trained a lot of people that have gone away to various locations around the world, and it's really taken off in other countries more so than Australia. Why is that?
Richard
I think just the type of animals that they've been using initially, like in South America that he had boss indicus type, which has a lot more follicles lot more eggs available for collection. So if you get more eggs off an animal, if you get double the number of eggs and buy synchronisation of boss Taurus, you're going to make double the number of embryos, so becomes commercially viable much quicker than boss Taurus, but the technology's improved over the last 20 years so that it's now viable in boss Taurus for Angus and Wagyu. Even Holsteins and Jerseys.
Mark
Yeah, you told me last night about the wagyu scenario where a particular entity had purchased a straw of semen for $50,000+ which blows my mind. And the result was an incredible number of progeny from that very expensive semen. Can you just unpack that a bit?
Mark Barnett (L) and Prof Richard Fry (R) review Angus Cattle IVF techniques
Richard
With IVF, you use a small amount of sperm to get the fertilization, even though it's still in the 1000s. A straw has about 20 million sperm in it and 10 million alive. So there's a lot of sperm there. With IVF, it is a very efficient use of semen because the sperm don't need to swim up the reproductive tract, we're putting it right in the well with the eggs. So we can put which still 1000s of sperm in with the eggs. So in this case, the client had I think he had two straws of semen for about $50,000. One of them, we cut in half, we processed that semen. I collected off 20 Wagyu donors obviously 20, elite wagyu donors who got a heap of eggs, we fertilize them with half a straw.
I think the first time we produced about 50 embryos. The second time we did it with the other half subtracted off the same donors again two weeks later. And we used the other half of this semen. We changed it a little bit because the fertilization rates weren't that great the first time. So we changed our procedure a little bit. And the third rates were really good the second time and we produced about 100 embryos. So we put in about 160 embryos and got 68 I think we end up with 68 calves. So from one straw of semen, it makes that $50,000 not seem so expensive.
Mark
Yeah, yeah, it's extraordinary. Well, we've been doing half a dozen donors or you've been collecting half a dozen of our donors. And we put one straw in on one occasion and had a failure. Complete write off very distressing. Next time we put two straws or two half straws from different bulls to try and cover our risk. Just unpack a little bit how how that works.
Richard
Yeah, it's sort of interesting because the biology of it is that the sperm needs to spend time on the reproductive tract to capacitate. So that means that like the head of the sperm, the accuracy time comes off so it can bind to the egg. So sperm normally with AI or natural mating spends time in the reproductive tract. When we do it in the lab, if you would put sperm me with eggs, it won't fertilize the eggs, so we have to incubate it with chemical heparin, which you've probably all heard of heparin, so blood thinner. But heparin is a compound that actually capacitates sperm in most species like cattle, sheep, pigs, humans so you can do IVF in those species. It doesn't capacitate it for stallions semen so you can't do IVF in horses, so that's a limitation but having said that we have to use heparin to capacitate the sperm. It works in most cases in most bulls, but in some bulls it won't capacitate it. That's why it might be perfectly good in the field because his sperm's in the reproductive tract through AI or natural mating. But with IVF he doesn't work because it won't capacitate. It's the same as if you freeze bull sperm. Some bulls freeze well, you freeze the semen and you thaw it, you get 80% alive. I think the cut offs about 50% alive, but there's some bulls you freeze the sperm and thaw it and you get 20% alive. So those bulls you can't use for semen collection
Mark
Yes, it's interesting isn't it., You can get some that are great in the paddock and not good in the factory as it were.
Richard
But it tends to be if they're good in the field. Yeah, I mean, they've got high sperm counts. That means that in the straws, you got a lot of live sperm. And so generally they're good. But, I'm just highlighting that what we're doing is in an artificial environment. So you do have other factors coming in, that you need to be aware of. Yeah, and by mixing two bulls, we haven't done it before, really, but with you guys, when we mixed two bulls,, it does cover your backside, so to speak, in terms of you only having one go at it, you don't know if the bull works, then you've covered yourself because it's very highly unlikely that two bulls won't work.
Mark
So in actual fact, what we've got is two sires, half a dozen donors, we have no clue what the actual parentage is until we do a DNA test when they're born, which is an interesting one. And so you don't do that on a custom basis and be able to say to somebody who wants to buy that embryo, hey, it might be one of these, or it might be one of those, or it could be that other one over there. And so it's an interesting way of looking at it, isn't it? It's just a whole different approach.
Richard
It is different, like most, most clients would insist that we use a certain bull, and over a certain cap, they might have specific mating. So for instance, if we do Brahman animals, we might do 20 animals in a day, and they might use four different bulls or five different bulls. So then we'll have these specific matings, but it's still a very good use of the semen because half a straw will do your four or five cows.
Mark
Yeah. Yeah. And and and do you get more embryos as a result of multiple donors and multiple sires? Or has that research not uncovered that?
Richard
I don't know. It's certainly not worse, certainly is a risk management tool. But I don't know whether you get more embryos. It's a pretty difficult experiment to do.
Mark
Yeah. We're surmising there may well be a competitive nature to there could be what's going on in here?
Richard
It's certainly not worse. Yeah. And so it's a good risk management tool if you need to use it Yeah.
Be sure to look out for Part 2 of our interview with Prof Richard Fry in the coming days. Just signup below for our newsletter to be sure you don’t miss it.
