The techniques and processes have been refined now to the point that, on average, there’s probably a five to 10-percent difference between conventional and IVF embryos for conception. It’s becoming very competitive.”

Photo Dr. Rob Stables’ Bow Valley Genetics will be one of the first clinics to offer IVF to clients in Western Canada.

© Top Stock

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A powerful genetic tool once used primarily in the dairy industry picks up steam, offering new possibilities for beef cattle reproduction.

The latest innovation in bovine reproductive technology is exciting, ground-breaking and

increasingly becoming a more feasible option for beef producers wanting to use embryo transplant with added benefits in their herd. It’s also not entirely new. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) was first introduced in cattle more than 15 years ago, and was poised to transform the beef industry. However, IVF embryo transfer originally had a number of problems associated with the resulting pregnancies, such as large calves and placental abnormalities.

“In the intervening years, they refined the process and figured out what was causing a lot of the large calves and other issues,” says Dr. Rob Stables, veterinary at Bow Valley Genetics Ltd. in Bassano, Alberta. These issues, he explains, were most likely caused by the type of media used in the lab process.

Stables first became interested in IVF when it was introduced in his early days as a vet. Despite the initial issues, he saw that “it had the potential to change the industry,” he says. “The excitement of a new technique and the advancement of the science was the initial draw to it, and now that they’ve figured out a lot of it, it made it a lot more practical. That’s when we decided to get into it, and it’s becoming more user-friendly and more practical in the real world.” Today, IVF is a more viable option for North American

beef producers, with companies specializing in dairy cattle IVF expanding their labs to bring in beef clients.

How IVF Works

The major differences between IVF and conventional embryo transfer are how the eggs (oocytes) are fertilized and when they are removed from the donor cow. “We’re going in before the cow has a heat and aspirating (removing) those eggs off of the ovary before they have a chance to ovulate,” says Stables. “Conventionally, the eggs are going to ovulate, get fertilized and be collected seven days later.”

The collected oocytes are put into a maturation media, simulating ovulation overnight. In the morning, they’re ready to be fertilized. “At the lab they’ll process the semen, mix it with the oocytes for fertilization and then the next five to six days are spent growing the embryos to the stage of embryo that we’d normally be collecting out of a conventional flush, which is a seven-day embryo,” Stables explains.

Bow Valley Genetics is a satellite collection facility for Boviteq, a bovine reproductive company with state-of-the-art labs in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, and Madison, Wisconsin, that focuses primarily on dairy cattle genetics. Central labs like Boviteq generally set the price for IVF embryo services, which will involve fixed costs for the collection, processing and lab

WORDS BY PIPER WHELAN

SUCCESSMULTIPLYING

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Top Part of the Bow Valley Genetics Team. (Back L - R) Clint Morasch, Matt Kumlin, Taylor Isley, Laura Devlin, Rob Stables (Front L - R) Lauren Erickson, Kari Graham, Paige Swinston. Missing are Angela Morasch and Marianne Janzen. © Top Stock

Bottom The facility at Bow Valley Genetics is state-of-art. © Angela Morasch

fees. They’ll also coordinate the set-up of recipients with the satellite facilities. “(With) Holsteins, they’ll typically send them back fresh or implant them there,” says Stables. Beef embryos tend to be produced at the central lab, frozen and sent back to the satellite facility to be implanted. They can also be sent back fresh if recipients are available.

Transferring IVF embryos is quite similar to the process for conventional embryos. “They’re frozen in essentially the same media,” he says. “You just have to be that much more careful with temperature, because IVF embryos and oocytes are very sensitive to temperature change, especially sudden changes.”

Like conventional flushing, the set-up of IVF requires injections of follicle-stimulating hormone, but at a lower dose. The set-up of donor and recipient cows also requires more planning and ongoing work. “It’s more intensive, procedure-wise, because you’re doing something to the cows every week,” says Stables. With conventional flushing, you collect every 30-60 days, whereas with IVF, you can aspirate the follicles every 14 days. “Conventional flushing is much more periodic, whereas with IVF, once you start a cow, you want to keep going with it because you don’t want to start and stop. It seems to give you better results if you continue on week to week.”

The Bow Valley Genetics Program

Stables grew up on a purebred Black Angus operation in Saskatchewan, where he first became interested in beef cattle genetics and reproductive technologies. “Once I got into university and vet school and became exposed to stuff, especially embryo transfer and advanced

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reproductive techniques, it just tweaked my interest and I decided to follow it.”

After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine in 1996, Stables began working at Davis-Rairdan Embryo Transplants at Crossfield, AB. “I’ve been doing embryo transfer for almost 20 years now,” he says. He worked at Davis-Rairdan for eight years, and then moved to Brooks, AB, with his wife, Candy. They purchased the Bow Valley Veterinary Clinic, a general practice, in 2004, and Stables ran his embryo transfer business on the side.

In 2010, Stables partnered with Clint and Angela Morasch of Lazy MC Angus at Bassano, AB, to form Bow Valley Genetics Ltd., building a donor facility and lab. Stables takes care of the veterinary work, while the Morasch family provides the

Exported to USA

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Image Dr. Matt Kumlin performs a conventional flush. ©Top Stock

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herdsman services. Bow Valley provides full embryo collection and transfer services, both on-farm or at their donor facility, and they are approved to produce embryos on and off-site for export.

Bow Valley also offers owners-use semen collection. “That’s just been growing every year, almost doubling every year. This last year was our best year yet,” says Stables. In 2014, the company opened an export-qualified bull stud with a capacity for 40 bulls approved for export. With this bull stud, they are in a partnership with Semex to produce semen for many of their beef bulls.

“We wanted to start providing the IVF services to our clients, since no one else is really providing them in Alberta and Saskatchewan,” he explains. There are facilities in eastern Canada and British Columbia that specialize in dairy cattle IVF, while IVF in beef cattle is still relatively new throughout Canada. “I’ve just implanted my first embryos this year, IVF embryos that came out of the States. It’s a much bigger market there, so it’s really taken off in the last couple of years.”

Making the Case for IVF

One of the problems initially hindering IVF was the cost of setting up a lab. “Every person who collects the oocytes had to be associated with the lab in the same facility,” Stables recalls. “For the sake of efficiency they’ve come up with this concept now where there’s a central lab, and then there’s a variety of satellite facilities that do the IVF aspirations.” From there the oocytes are sent by courier overnight to the central lab. Bow Valley, a Canadian Embryo Transfer Association-certified facility, is one of Boviteq’s satellites in the prairies.

“It think the biggest thing that has been a detriment in the past and probably holding it back is achieving comparable pregnancy results to conventional flushing,” he explains. “But the techniques and processes have been refined now to the point that, on average, there’s

IN VIVO VS. IN VITRO EMBRYO COLLECTION 2014

*Data obtained from Canadian Embryo Transfer Association, www.ceta.ca

Transferable In-VitroEmbryos Produced

In-Vitro Embryos Frozen

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“We wanted to start providing the IVF services to our clients, since no one else is really providing them in Alberta and Saskatchewan.”

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The Semen Side of the Equation

Given that IVF is an intriguing technology, is becoming more practical, and the

advantages that this form of collection has, what innovations does this technology bring considering semen? Here are some considerations and benefits of IVF when deciding on the semen you’ll use in the process:

Due to the more intensive process of IVF, it’s important to have your breeding plans ready to go a couple of collections in advance. “You want to use a different bull on each collection, likely, so you might want to plan out your next three or four collections and organize your semen all at once, because the semen has to get to the lab and be there on time,” says Stables.

IVF better facilitates the sharing of one expensive straw of semen between several cows, giving more options when breeders get together to buy a pricey straw from a coveted bull. “There was an example of an Angus bull — whose semen sells for upwards of $12,000 a straw now — and I know of situations where four people got together and shared the cost of the straw to produce the embryos,” he says.

While using sexed semen is often ineffective in conventional flushing due to the low dose, it’s much better suited to IVF. “If you’re doing your fertilization in a little petri dish that’s a couple of centimetres across, you can make that work much better,” Stables explains. The lab can also create and use what is called reverse-sort semen in the fertilization process. “You can take a straw of regular frozen semen that’s not sexed and they’ll thaw it, run it through the semen sexing machine, and then you can just use either the male or the female semen to fertilize your eggs, if you have a preference for one or the other.”

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probably a five to 10-percent difference between conventional and IVF embryos for conception. It’s becoming very competitive.”

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While the optimum age and condition of a donor cow is similar to that required for conventional flushing, IVF can give you a jump-start in collecting embryos from your desired donor cow. A major advantage is that you can collect oocytes from heifers at 10 months of age, which Stables notes is particularly attractive for the dairy industry. Often, IVF is a good alternative for cows who haven’t successfully given good embryos through conventional flushing. As some cows don’t respond to either method, there’s no guarantee, but it is another option.

The benefits don’t stop there: if you’d like embryos from a specific cow and her own calf on the ground that same year, IVF can facilitate that. “The follicles containing the oocytes are always developing on the ovaries, and even though the cow is pregnant, we’re not interfering with the uterus. We’re only touching the ovaries, so as long as you don’t bother the corpus luteum – the structure on the ovary that maintains the pregnancy – you can aspirate follicles and get oocytes just as if she was an open cow,” Stables explains. He finds this is the main attraction from beef producers who find it hard to breed back donor cows after being open for a year. “As long as you can reach the ovaries, you can continue to do IVF, and that generally last to about 90-120 days — maybe even up to 150 days — of pregnancy, depending on the cow.”

Now that this technology is also becoming a more realistic option for Canada’s beef producers, it remains to be seen how exactly this innovation will impact the industry, and where reproductive technologies will go next.

“Canada and the U.S. have a strong bilateral trading relationship in bovine genetics, with the U.S. ranking as Canada’s top export destination for bovine genetics exports, and Canada being the U.S.’s most important trading partner for their products.”

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