It is based on the work of chief science officer Associate Professor Cather Simpson, who is also a director of the five-year-old The Photon Factory within the university’s science faculty, which provides high tech laser pulses for a wide range of applications for scientists nationwide.
The start-up’s patented microfluidic technology manipulates and sorts the sperm by sex for the dairy industry, in a way that avoids damage to the sperm membrane during processing and has the same fertility rates as unsexed sperm.
Director Brent Ogilvie, currently the second-largest shareholder of UniServices, said Engender’s process should be significantly cheaper than the incumbent, competing technology which has a big impact on fertility rates and is much more expensive than unsexed sperm.
Engender signed a deal for an undisclosed sum a year ago with one of the world’s largest artificial insemination companies which has provided it with crucial sperm biology expertise and access to its artificial insemination laboratories and testing regimes.
The capital raise will fund hiring engineers in January and development work on a microfluidic chip – a plastic chip lasered down to a minute scale as a vehicle for the technology that separates the sperm into male and female. Engender has raised a total $1 million from two previous capital rounds.
The chip will be trialled mid-2016 on New Zealand cows undergoing in vitro fertilisation and then, all going well, on those doing artificial insemination later in the year. It’s hoped to have a commercial product in the market in two years through licensing the technology to a number of artificial insemination companies.
Ogilvie said the technology was initially focused on the dairy industry where artificial insemination is an estimated US$1.5 billion industry annually. “We could address a fifth of that if we had a technology that can separate male from female sperm at a reasonably low cost.”
It could be a management tool for farmers when the dairy industry is buoyant and herds are being expanded and in a flat dairy sector sperm selection could be used to help boost productivity gains in the bottom half of the herd and lift returns on bobby calves, he said.
Another likely use was in the pig industry, given Asians, in particular, dislike boar taint in pigmeat and prefer to eat pigmeat from females.
