Grant: Idea to Innovation

Sex selection of cattle is required in dairy and meat industries: cows are needed for milk production while bulls are preferable for meat production. Cattle's sex depends on whether the egg is fertilized with an X- or Y-chromosome-bearing sperm cell (simply X and Y cells). To facilitate the production of only cows or only bulls, artificial insemination with semen cells of the desirable sex is used. The industrial technology used for separation of X and Y cells utilizes the small difference (3-4%) in the amounts of DNA between X and Y cells. It requires expensive equipment and separates cells one-by-one by the slow and cell-damaging process of Fluorescence-Assisted Cell Sorting (FACS). The drawbacks of FACS-based cell separation make single-sex sperm expensive and inefficient in fertilization. We recently invented a generic technology that integrates development of affinity probes (aptamers) for cell-surface biomarkers and aptamer-facilitated batch separation of cells. The technology is used for two different applications under different names: AptaBiD and AptaBatch. Four patent applications were filed to protect different aspects of the intellectual property for this technology and a paper on the technology was published in a high-profile peer-reviewed journal: Journal of the American Chemical Society. AptaBatch has three key advantages over the FACS-based technology; it is faster, less damaging for cells, and requires less expensive equipment. In our extensive study and method development, we demonstrated that AptaBatch is applicable to different cell types including sperm cells. In this Phase 1 project, we will: (i) gather additional information for comprehensive patent protection and file a full patent application based on the provisional patent filed in June 2008, (ii) scale up and validate the technology using industrial standards for acceptance criteria, (iii) initiate intense communication with potential technology acceptors in preparation for Phase IIb. We estimate the risk of the project as MINIMAL and the chance of transferring the project to Phase IIb as HIGH.