Empowering farmers and vets with precision semen quality measurement tech

Thomas Slattery spoke with Dr Tiffany Wood the Chief Executive Officer of Dyneval Ltd, a company with an award-winning patented technology for precise measurement of semen quality based at the Roslin Innovation Centre. Dyneval was founded in April 2020 by Tiffany and Dr Vincent Martinez, both complex fluid physicists from the University of Edinburgh who have researched the motion of tiny particles at the micron scale for over two decades. The novel technology measures the mean speed and percentage of progressively motile spermatozoa data from the fluctuations of light passing through a sample of semen.

Dyneval’s award-winning Dynescan is a portable instrument for precise measurement of semen quality for bovine, equine, ovine and porcine. Powered by Dyneval’s proprietary software, the Dynescan delivers reliable measurements of the percentage progressive motility (% motility) and spermatozoa’s mean speed (micron/second). Designed for dual-mode operation, the Dynescan allows for visual inspection in addition to automated, objective measurement.

Their automated, precise and user-independent measurement technology can analyse fresh, frozen, or sexed semen within minutes and without the need for any additional equipment. Dynescan requires minimum training, is robust and portable, and can be used in a clinic or lab or by the pen side.

Dynescan technology can help the food-production industry move towards net-zero by making better decisions to optimise production efficiency.

• Assess bull fertility and eliminate poor-quality semen prior to Artificial Insemination
• Make well-informed decisions to enhance herd management
• Increase conception rates by up to 20%
• Increase profits on the average UK dairy farm of £37k /year
• Reduce methane emissions by up to 10%

 Dyneval’s tiered pricing allows users to use the Dynescan according to their needs and seasonal demands, weekly, monthly, or yearly.  Get in touch for more info or to request a demo.

Transcript

0:03

Hi. So we're speaking with Tiffany Wood at Dynaval about their exciting semen measurement product. Hi, Tiffany, thank you very much for joining me this morning. And it'd be really lovely to hear a little bit about the company and exactly what you're up to. Hi, Tom, and thank you for the invitation. So, Dynaval is an innovative company with a new technology for precise measurement of semen quality. And we just launched our product in March. And so it's really a product that's aimed for anyone in the livestock production industry to use, whether they're a genetics company, a vet, an AI technician or farmer. And they will be able to use our very easy to use automated technology to obtain measurements of the percentage, motility and mean speed of the semen samples they're using. So one thing that we really focus on at Agri-EPI is try to find real farmer and agricultural challenges and then obviously work with very talented tech developers like yourself to find solutions to those. What do you see as the kind of fundamental challenge that is currently facing this particular industry that Dyneval is looking to try and solve? Yes, well, farmers at the moment, particularly at the moment, are facing rising feed costs and still they have pressure, consumer pressure on them to reduce their carbon footprint. And really, if they can improve conception rates, this is a long way to retaining more profit on farm and reducing the carbon footprint through improving efficiency, the efficiency of livestock production. And so we believe that our technology can enable them to make decisions about which semen samples they use or which bulls they use to really optimize the chances of good conception rates and good production efficiency. What does the landscape look like at the moment? What does a vet or farmer. Do to try and measure these things? Currently? Yes. So it's quite complex, really, because there are two different ways semen assessment might happen on farm. So the first is that farmers may have a bull and they will invite the vets at least once a year to actually come to the farm, take a semen sample from the bull and then check the sample quality. And at the moment the vet is taking a normal optical microscope and is essentially assessing it by eye. And it has been shown that the assessment by vets can vary by up to plus or minus -20% so there's huge variation so what they can do now with the Dynascan is the vet can just pop in a sample and perform a measurement. And our measurements vary by less than 1% between users. So they're very reproducible and reliable. So that can make the job of the vet much easier. The other side of things is particularly on, say, dairy farms, where there's a lot of artificial insemination at the moment, genetics companies are doing a good job of using very sort of expensive lab based equipment to check the semen quality at the genetics company. But then once it's dispatched, it's distributed, it can be traveling many miles. It's stored on farm under liquid nitrogen, and it may not be topped up often enough and it may be stored for even years. And so what farmers can do now is they could actually hire a Dynescan for a week just to check a sacrificial straw from a batch of semen to check that it is of the quality that they want to use before going ahead with artificial insemination, because at the moment, there is no way for them to check. And so they just go ahead with the AI and that means that they can't actually check the success until they actually scan the cows three weeks later. So really this is a possibility. Well, this offers them potential for saving time and improving efficiency and really achieving the highest conception rates that they can achieve. So it's interesting. I think one of the themes that comes out across agricultural technology and innovation is this idea of measure to manage, and we see it and everything. And the role that a lot of fourth wave AG tech has is making those measurements faster, easier, cheaper and more accessible for whether it be academics or farmers. So we're seeing kind of developments happening in soil sampling and measurement. And so this feels like it's similar in the sense that it's giving up a lot more control and accessibility to these very accurate something that might actually require normally being sent off to a lab at vast expense can actually be done on farm with what we see is a very portable device. Yeah, that's certainly right. I'm sure farmers listening are very familiar with the amount of investment they've put into actually making sure that they're getting the cows the right nutrition and observing whether they're going into heat and maybe controlling estrous. But how much are they investing in making sure that they're using the right semen quality to optimize conception rates? And I think that's where our Dynascan comes in to really make sure that they're working with both sides of the equation when it comes to reproduction. So something I always quite just ask, what's the origin story? How did the company come together? Is there an interesting kind of inspiration for how this came about? Well, that's a really good question. And whenever I'm talking to members of Agri-EPI, farmers and vets, I'm always very conscious that I don't have a veterinary background because myself and my co founder are actually physicists. And until just a couple of years ago, we were thinking almost entirely about the physics of complex fluids, which is essentially where you have liquids, the little bits of them that move around, maybe due to diffusion or maybe due to motel motion you can have with microorganisms. And my co founder was in the office next door and he has been doing quite a lot of measurements, looking at the maturity of bacteria and also algae. And really what we then realized talking with vets, particularly at the University of Edinburgh where we were based, was that there was an opportunity to help vets actually be able to assess semen quality. And so we experimented with a few samples and realized that we had something to offer this market. And actually, it's something that I think we saw passionately about because everyone eats food and it's really important that we support farmers to produce food as efficiently as possible. It's really nice to hear that this isn't meant to plug for Agri-EPI, but I think this is exactly what I feel as an organization we're here to do, which is to find incredibly , talented innovators like yourself and help them then access farmers and things like that. And it's interesting that you had this kind of very interesting insight and it's been used in an area that you probably hadn't necessarily imagined. Essentially, there what you're talking about is seeing how certain samples link to conceptions. What kind of size of trial would you be looking realistically for that to be, for that to work? Well, the more data we have, the better, really. So if we can have a whole nation of farms, that is the ultimate. But I think if we're talking thousands of inseminations with a good variety of samples, that's a fantastic start. And of course, it's probably most easily done where records are kept very well on farm so we can actually look at the data and interrogate it and understand it fully. But yes, so really, it's a bit of a call to action to encourage farmers to get in touch with us if they'd like to help us improve our ability to help them potentially predict the conception rates based on our measurements. And that's the subscription. I guess the question we get back from the farmer community is when they're being asked to get involved in these kind of trials, how's that going to help us? Essentially, the idea is that once you've managed to conduct these trials, you should, in theory, be in a position to say, well, actually, these particular batches, all these types of behavior, can potentially result in a much higher conception rate. Yeah. So essentially we're working on algorithms to convert our measurements into predictions. Really, we need to test that as much as we can so we can be as confident as possible that we are giving a good recommendation to farmers in the future. It's very exciting. So it sounds like you've come a long way in a relatively short space of time. What are the plans for the future? Where do you see, obviously, the trials that we've spoken about and you're already working with farmers? Where do you kind of want to see things going? What are the next big steps? Yes, well, ultimately, our goal is that everyone across the industry will be using a Dynascan so that they can have conversations with each other knowing that they are using instruments that they can rely upon, that are not affected by any settings or anything like that, by the user, because ours is all automated on that side of things. And I think it will enable the whole industry as a whole to identify where inefficiencies are happening and really optimize the whole supply chain. And so our goal is to be the gold standard for semen assessment across the industry. I think it's probably worth reiterating that point because obviously in conversations we had before, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems to me that obviously there is sending off to genetics labs, but outside of that, there is no standardized technology for doing this. As you said, it's essentially done either in labs or done by eye through a microscope with these huge variations. So essentially there isn't really a fixed common language or any other options for this across. Yes, the current lab technology is essentially called computer semen team analysis. And the way that works is really to identify cells in a video and track them from frame to frame. And there are also portable versions of that type of technology, but it has certain limitations, one of which is it only really works over a narrow concentration range. So that's having to go to a lot of work to make sure that they've got the right dilution and it won't necessarily work on every AI straw as well. And also there's quite a lot of variation in the measurements that can be obtained using that technique, which can often depend on the time after the sample has been prepared, just because of sedimentation and other processes that are happening. And the way our technology works is completely different because we're looking at the fluctuations. We're measuring the fluctuations in intensity of light as it passes through a sample. So you can imagine that if you've got fast moving sperm, the intensity fluctuations are very fast and they're much slower, slow moving. And using our clever physics, we extract from that the measurements of the key parameters. And because we're using this technique, we've got thousands of spermatozoa in our field of view, so we're able to measure a very wide concentration range. And it also means we've got very good statistics there because we've got a very large population, so we get very precise measurements. Yeah, so it's a real paradigm shift. It's quite exciting to use technology, and obviously for people who can't here and if they want to visit your website, but this is a very portable device on the top of the desk, plugged into a laptop. Speaking of which, if farmers, vets, geneticists want to get involved, trial the product, use the product commercially, how can they go about that? What's the process? Well, there are several different ways, but one of the best ways is just to email us at contact@dyneval.com. You can also browse our website too. And we also at that point, we can then set up a demonstration, either at your farm or maybe an online demonstration, which we do quite a lot at the moment. It seems comparatively quite a simple product to use. I think with a lot of kind of emerging culture technologies, there's often a fear, particularly from producers, farmers, that they'll need a lot of hand holding around these technologies. Is this something which, once there's been some training on it's kind of you can just let people go with it. Is it very technically difficult? No, it's actually very easy to use once you've been shown how to use it. We've had quite a few customers already, and we just launched the product in March and had a few customers already sort of happily using it and getting very nice data. Once trained, it's easy to use. The most tricky thing is actually obtaining the sample and filling the sample slide. Well, it's very exciting. Very exciting. And I think it's clear from the conversation that this is something which can have a huge benefit. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to sort of say other than this call out for farmers to get involved with a potential trial that you're looking to do? I don't think there's really anything additional to add, but we would love to hear from people interested in sort of subscribing to our service or working with us on a research basis. And so just click on that. At the moment, I believe you're working towards a rental service. You don't have to purchase a box or anything like that. That's correct. We've created a service, so either farmers can essentially subscribe to it for a week, so they will receive the hardware, the piece of the device, together with the laptop with the software, and they can happily take measurements. But alternatively, we have a monthly or even annual subscription as well. That's great. I think obviously, particularly in the current climate, avoiding capex investments is always a nice thing. So that sounds like a great business model you got set up there. Well, look, Tiffany, it's been wonderful speaking with you, and obviously we will be catching up with you through the Agri-EPI Centre regularly and seeing how things go. And thank you very much for chatting just about. Danielle. Thank you very much. Too not. Bye.