Embryo transfer start-up to ‘revolutionise’ beef and dairy

A tech start-up says it can reduce genetic improvement processes in livestock from seven years to just seven days.

Nbryo co-founder Euan Murdoch, left, with chief executive Gerard Davis at the Murdoch family's highly innovative Nindooinbah artificial breeding centre south of Brisbane.

A tech start-up is promising to boost cattle genetics and the global beef industry’s welfare and environmental credentials with a revolutionary artificial breeding method that cuts seven years of selective breeding into a week.

Led by Herron Pharmaceuticals founder Euan Murdoch, Queensland-based Nbryo plans to use its swift embryo transfer technology to change the face of the beef and dairy industries.

It allows cattle breeders to be more selective for desired traits, such as weight gain, lower methane emissions or no horns, and to generate those characteristics in their herds.

Mr Murdoch said increased productivity would mean lower costs for consumers and more consistent meat quality: “It’s a consumer-focused technology. Consumers want consistency, they want to be able to buy a piece of meat or milk knowing where it has come from and being confident in the quality of the product.”

He said the technology would enable producers to deliver products with specific attributes such as marble score and weight range with greater predictability.

“You can determine whether it’s a bull or a heifer, or whether it has horns, which deliver much better welfare outcomes, or slick coats, which handle the heat better,” Mr Murdoch said.

“If you can diagnose these traits in an embryo, then you can fundamentally change the beef industry. It will lead to more profitable farms, which means more profitable rural communities.”

Much of Nbryo’s work is done on Mr Murdoch’s property Nindooinbah, near Beaudesert, south of Brisbane. Nbryo applies technology used for human in vitro fertilisation to livestock purposes and focuses on making the embryo transfer process more efficient and cost-effective.

“The way embryos have been transferred over the past 70 years hasn’t changed,” Mr Murdoch said. “We’re applying technology smarts to develop an embryo transfer device.”

The Nbryo lab.

Nbryo has been invested in by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was recently given a significant capital boost from the Queensland Investment Corporation’s Venture Capital Development Fund via agtech-focused Mandalay Venture Partners. ‘That investment will enable us to further our research and develop our technology,” Mr Murdoch said.

“We’re doing trials in Australia, in New Zealand, in ­Europe, and this time next year we will be rolling out trials even further. We have the potential to build a global high tech business here in Australia. It’s that significant.”

Mandalay was among five venture capital firms selected by the Queensland govern­ment to receive a portion of a newly established $130m fund aimed at investing in the state’s start-ups. It also secured funding for another Queensland-based start-up, Naturo, which has pioneered non-thermal processing technology to improve the digestibility of milk.