A new animal health company, EmGenisys, has created what it describes as the first non-invasive and objective method to evaluate a bovine embryo’s health to improve the success rates of embryo transfer and in vitro fertilization.
“We are scanning embryos and using software to provide veterinarians and IVF enterprises with more objective data regarding an embryo’s developmental stress, metabolic function and overall health,” says Cara Wells, founder and CEO.
The company has developed a web-based platform, EmGenuity, which hosts an advanced analytics and machine learning assessment called EmVision.
When using the tools, cattle pregnancy rates for both beef and dairy can be improved by up to 20%, the company reports.
How It Works
EmVision allows veterinarians to record 30-second videos of embryos with their smartphone, upload videos into the company’s web-based platform and receive a digital report with detailed information.
The resulting information can help practitioners determine whether to keep an embryo or discard it, thereby optimizing the breeding strategy for a dairy or beef producer.
“Veterinarians using the system can create a higher level of satisfaction for their clients when they get higher pregnancy rates.” Wells say. “They’re going to identify more inviable embryos, so they’re not going to be transferring bad embryos, which is great from cost and labor perspectives.”
Improved Accuracy
Historically, technicians have graded embryos by evaluating their cell shape, size and color under a microscope.
Wells believes the pitfalls from that approach are two-fold. First, she says technicians don’t always have sufficient knowledge and experience to determine which embryos are good. The second challenge is there’s a lot of things going on inside an embryo the human eye can’t see.
“A healthy embryo should be growing, it should be using energy, it should be dividing, and doing the things it needs to do to become a calf,” Wells says. “Sometimes we can’t visually tell which ones are growing in a healthy way and which ones could even be dying.”
She adds that as the EmGenisys technology was being developed, her team realized that IVF embryos and conventionally flushed embryos develop a little bit differently, and they made adjustments. “So, we had to create models specific for those,” she says. “We’ve also realized there are differences in beef species versus dairy species, and just a lot of variables that we’ve used to improve our prediction accuracy.”
Go-To-Market Strategy
Wells says the company’s direct customers will be veterinarians, embryologists and IVF enterprises.
“But it is the cattle producer that bears the economic burden of failed pregnancy, so it’s really critical for them that every embryo that gets transferred is alive and viable and produces that calf that they just spent money making,” she says. “So, I see beef and dairy producers as important influencers and advocates for the technology.”
Wells says EmGenisys is ramping up to introduce the technology commercially yet this year.
“Our go-to market plan is to do custom pilots where we train the data specifically for the different farms on their embryos with their production protocol, so we can have the best performance possible,” she says.
The company is in the process of enrolling select farms and laboratories now for the pilots. More information is available at https://www.emgenisys.co/
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