Prof Richard Fry - the complete interview
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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?
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 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.
Mark
So exploring further how different IVF is to normal mullet:
Richard
The differences. Most of the work is done in the laboratory, rather than the cow. So it's more difficult and more expensive. Because we're taking the eggs by ultrasound from the cow. And doing the fertilization in the lab, then we have to grow them for six days in a lab to an embryo before we freeze them or transfer them.
So that's very briefly the procedure. The advantages are that we do it with animals without hormone stimulation. So you can particularly in Boston, because in the northern part of Australia, that they don't like needles, and they don't like being handled twice a day often bring so they can bring them straight out of the paddock to you that morning.
You can do the collection and go back out in a paddock. And the same with dairy cows, they can after milking, they can bring the dairy cow to you, you can do the pickup and then take them back.
So we do that or we travel on the farm to do it's better in an environment, you know your own fixed environment, you know, you will get better results because everything is controlled compared with on-farm.
But Australia is a big place. So you know not it's not viable to ship the cows all the time. It's easy to ship. So having centers around the place would be a huge advantage. But the benefit of IVF is that one You don't need to use drugs two that you can do it in situations that you can't do mullet.
So one of the interesting things in what we do quite regularly is collect eggs off pregnant cows. So those cows can be up to four months pregnant and you can still collect
Because you're bypassing the uterus, you can still collect eggs off of the ovaries and never removed. Okay, so that's an advantage because normally in mullet programs, the cow might well not have a calf for 1, 2, 3 years because she's a very good cow, and they've been flushed all the time.
Yeah. Whereas with this procedure, you can do it when they're non-pregnant, but you can also do it, you can also mate that cow so you can be pregnant, so you know that she gets pregnant carries a calf raises a calf. So a natural calf and you can get whatever you get from IVF is additional to what you normally get through AI or natural mating and so on.
Mark
And so Richard is there an average number that is different in terms of embryos collected from one method versus the other?
Richard
It depends on species, and the number depends on spaces like obviously if you get twice as many eggs from Brahman type cattle, you're going to make twice as many embryos on average as you would from say, Holsteins.
Angus sits somewhere in the middle, where we will make an average of four to five embryos per donor. But it can vary like flushing night traditional flushing from naught to 10, yet, but you will still average about four to five.
I guess with Mullet, it's around about six. So but it is comparable. The other advantage with IVF is that we can collect off the same animal every week or every fortnight. So you can build a bank of embryos very quickly from your elite animals, which effectively is what we've done. Yeah.
And the challenge that we've had is to be able to freeze these IVF embryos, and but we're getting on top of that, now I'm getting pretty reasonable results where you would expect to get at least a 40% pregnancy rate with these embryos, yet, we're hoping for more than average, we always have.
I don't like to oversell technology and get people's expectations too high. But you've covered so much ground you never over-promise I can see that. No, no, that's right. That look a lot of people do over-promise with the new technology. And then that leads to disappointment.
And, and probably it has led to the length of uptake of the technology in Australia from over-promising various, you know, we in South America, particularly Brazil, where they have a narrow cattle and they get even more eggs and you get from Brahman, really, yeah, they probably average 30 eggs compared with about 12 with an Angus.
So if they're producing about eight embryos so becomes a very efficient technology. So that's why the uptake was not because the technology was better just because of the breed of animals. So is a big breed variation, it probably with, in Australia Braham would probably be up the top.
Holsteins are probably the most difficult, which wouldn't surprise anyone. But having said with where you collect an average of probably about six to eight, our sites and make two to three embryos. Yep. They've probably doesn't surprise anyone, because they've been bred specifically for milk.
And when you breed for one trait, the other traits fall away a bit. Yeah, that is being addressed. And having said that, I mean, we have still done Holsteins that might produce you 12 embryos, you know, so you do get individuals is a huge individual variation as Yeah, well,
Mark
I was gonna ask you about that the variation within the breed when you can find your outliers and yeah,
Richard
I'm what's interesting, you know, I still buy palpation, because if you put your hand in and feel the ovary, it's the ovary is what I call a pancake ovary, a flat ovary, therefore follicles, I don't know the reason for it, but if they're flat, I think I read even in Holsteins, you will get quite a lot of eggs.
But the the frequency of picking those animals up in Holsteins is a lot lower than other in other breeds. It's quite common in Brahman.
Mark
So can we see in the future you dropping into a farm that might be a collection of on their farm there might be a collection of neighbour's cows 10 or a dozen that you would operate on?
Yeah, in a day and then disappear and back to your lab with the goodies. And I'm just trying to think of the practicality from the farmer-owners point of view and from the, from the donor cow owners point of view. So you mentioned no drugs, just
Richard
bring them in, bring them in? Yeah, now and we do that now. And particularly for I'm not only dairy cows, but particularly for dairy cows were at a certain place they like on Monday, this Monday, I'm going to a place in Victoria where I'm going to be doing 13 dairy cows, they're not all from that client, he might have four and then there's other from other clients are collected at that place, because it's not efficient going round to each place doing two cows.
No, no, no, no, we can't make money out of that as any of setting up doing the work, you're doing an hour's work on an hour and a half's worth pulling down going in next place, it doesn't work like that we can. So we have this setup, because we need to take out essentially like a little lab where to find the eggs and put them in the media. So maturation media to start growing embryos on site.
Mark
So you could do a dozen cows or 15 a day is a good day
Richard
15. Yeah, 15 is a good number. 10 is okay, 20 is good. But after 20, for one operator, it's getting a fairly big day, but it is in the order of doing between 10 and 20. And 15 is a good day. But if they're all at one centre, then you can it's very efficient, you know, you just doing one cow after another after another, and the lab is set up and it becomes quite efficient.
And then we get enough eggs, and enough individuals to overcome the individual variation. If we go to do two animals, you don't know we've got two poor ones, two good ones, one good one, one poor one, whatever, in terms of egg, egg numbers of eggs and quality of eggs. If you do at least 10 animals, you're gonna get something. So it makes sense to be able to pool about 10 animals.
So then you can work on averages. When you work with really low numbers. You can't work on averages. Yeah. So if we were doing 10 Angus, we would expect to produce 40 embryos? Yeah, it could be. It could be as low as 20 one Day it could be as high as 60. Another day. Yeah.
Just on unlock stage of the cycle. When you do it, all those types of things. Nutrition, which we don't know much about. But all of those sorts of things that could depend upon that you would average you should average from 10 animals 40 to 50 embryos each time.
Mark
This looks like it could be a new service that could be coordinated as a collective of breeders Donor cows and even facilitates the collection from pregnant Donors - isn't technology wonderful.
Richard, we'll leave it there for the moment and return to discuss the advancements in juvenile collections and how to halve the genetic turnover period.
Mark
Thanks Richard, can we switch gears to where this technology is going?
We dried off from the rain yesterday, we came by the fire here and sat down, had a beer and started talking about the juvenile collections that you've been doing.
Richard
Yeah, this was one of the reasons I enjoy being a scientist. Early on my interests were the juvenile from a scientific point of view and from a genetic gain point of view.
We can collect eggs, from six months old calves, females, then we essentially can't do anything about than nine months gestation. But we can pretty well make the generation about 15 months, rather than 30 months, where you normally clipped out at about 15-month-old then add nine months to get to 24 - 30 months, right? Yeah. So we can really halve that generation interval by collecting off very young animals.
And that's what interests me since 1992.
Mark
That’s a while ago Richard, he got it right?
Richard
Not yet. We know we can do it, you know the ovaries are as smallest little finger. So we know we need to have hormonal stimulation on those animals. And then we can collect the eggs and we know we can collect eggs.
But those eggs from juveniles are compromised, and we're still working on ways of making that better. So with those eggs, we can make embryos and we can get pregnancies, but the rates at the moment are probably too low to be commercially adopted widely. It still is used a little bit in specific niche markets or regions.
But it's not used widely, which I think is when you're talking about in the future. This will be the future when we can get those oocytes competent so we get similar rates of embryo development and pregnancy rates that we get with adults then I think this juvenile work will really take off because you can actually pedigree stack that way.
Mark
Yeah, so we're having the generational turnover scenario. And boy, oh boy that is so significant. And it just underlines the importance of genomics because otherwise, you can make a dogs breakfast of all of this.
Richard
When I was working as a research scientist that's what we got the money to do. But then because genomics took so long, actually, because there were gene markers in those days.
they said they could work out the gene markers in three years and we'll be able to tell you how good your juvenile is when the animals born, how good it's gonna be. However the reality is that its only come online in the last three or four years. Yeah. Right.
So that technology is what's held back juvenile technology. So we had research funding in those days and we got so far along the track myself and another scientist Colin Earl from South Australia.
Yep, we are so far along the track, but then all the funding dried up because they couldn't identify that when the female was born, how good it was going to be and the genomic technology has taken 20 years to develop.
And that's largely due to the capacity of computers, my understanding is to handle all the data and get good value. But now that you can identify or fairly reasonably, identify those elite females when they're born, then it's juvenile technology that interests me even more. And I think the adaptation of the technology will be adopted by the industry pretty quick if we can get it working.
Mark
Well, we're looking forward to hearing lots more about that. Look, it's been good to chat. We better go and brush off the gumboots. I'll tell you what, just this whole exercise of coming down here, synchronizing cows getting ready in the middle of a COVID environment, we didn't know whether you were going to be able to be here until the very last moment. Its a heck of a way to lift the stress levels.
But it's been a fabulous few days and we look forward to you coming back again another time and we'll let you know how things pan out when we preg test.
Richard
Okay, thanks I look forward to doing more work and more research with you. Terrific. Cheers.
Mark:
Now that we are done and dusted with that program, we’ll await the preg test results to see how successful it’s really been.
In the meantime, we are planning a Special Spring Sale of pregnant recipients for those who would like to secure some top 1% breeders. They will be represented by a mix of elite donors and sires with predictive mating statistics that are second to none.
We will be offering a limited number of PTIC recipients for those who do not want the risk of getting a successful pregnancy. These pregnancies will come from our August ET program and will have an end of May and end of June calving. They will be available in November once their pregnancy is regarded as secure to travel.
We’ll also be able to tell you what sex the calf will be!
As the Australian herd rebuild gathers pace, it makes great economic sense to underpin your herd with future-focused female genetics and renowned sires. The combinations of which has taken many generations and enables you to create a solid foundation from which to grow your cattle business.
All the details will be on the Barnett Angus website in the coming weeks. Feel free to register your interest on our email update list so you can get the details as they come to hand.
I hope you have enjoyed this interview and please drop us an email any time and share your thoughts on ways of advancing the wonderful Angus breed.
All the best. Mark
Ph: 0409 023 140
