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American Saddlebred
XY Inc. Sets Record Pace In Equine Reproductive Technology
The equine program of XY Inc. continues to set a record pace in international equine reproductive technology. Over the last 18 months alone, XY Inc. has optimized its advances in equine sex-selection technology to the point where the method is commercially viable. Currently, XY Inc.’s overall sex-selection rate for horses averages 94 percent. Consider these accomplishments:
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Embryo Transfer. Professor Lee Morris, University of Sydney and an XY Inc. research collaborator, announced the first equine pregnancy in Australia to combine sexed sperm, artificial insemination and non-surgical embryo transfer. The foal was born in December 2002.
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Second Generation. XY Inc. introduced “First Lady,” the first sex-selected offspring of the world’s first sex-selected mare and first sex-selected stallion. Born April 30, she is the daughter of “Call Me Madam,” the horse that captured the world’s attention in 1998 as the first horse in the world to have her sex selected prior to conception via a cutting-edge cell-sorting technology developed by XY Inc. First Lady, the second-generation offspring, was conceived using an extremely low dose of fresh (non-frozen), sexed sperm – 17 million, or three percent of the recognized “standard” dosage used with AI in horses.
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Sorted, Frozen, Thawed Sperm. In August, four healthy foals, conceived via artificial insemination using frozen-thawed sperm, were born at Moondrift Farms, XY Inc.’s headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado. In two of these four, the sperm had been sorted before being frozen then thawed, with the resulting foals – a filly and a colt – the correct pre-selected gender.
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Show Horse. Currently, a Morgan mare, “Vive La Difference,” is the first world-class show mare to be bred successfully, using sorted sperm and AI.
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Argentina. The first sex-selected foals, conceived via XY Inc. technology, have been born in Argentina.
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First U.S. Equine License in Sexed Selection. Inguran, a biotechnology transfer company located in Navasota, Texas, acquired an XY Inc. license to bring sex-selection technology to the North American equine and cattle breeding industries.
“In 1982, when world scientists first gathered to discuss the possibility of sex selection in mammals, scientists concluded sex selection simply was not going to be possible,” recalls Mervyn Jacobson, CEO and president of XY Inc. Jacobson points out in the eight years since XY Inc. was founded in 1996, the company has made major strides in bringing equine sex selection to commercial status. “When the first sex-selected calf was born in 1995, the view was ‘Well, cows maybe, but horses – never.’”
He continues, “When XY Inc. produced the first sex-selected foal in 1998, scientists said, ‘O.K., maybe for fresh sperm but never for frozen.’ Therefore, our new foals, produced with sexed/frozen/thawed sperm and AI, represent monumental achievements in animal reproduction.”
XY Inc., a global biotech company headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, holds exclusive global rights to the license for sperm sorting by flow cytometry in all non-human mammals. The sperm-sorting technology, one of the world’s most promising biotech industries, separates sperm that carry the X chromosome and produce females from sperm that carry the Y chromosome and produce males.
XY Inc. researchers have made rapid progress since 1998 when they successfully combined surgical techniques and sexed sperm to produce “Call Me Madam,” the first horse in the world to have her sex selected prior to conception.
“Through the diligent work of our XY Inc. researchers and collaborators, we have optimized the sex-selection methods used with horses,” says Jacobson. “In the last year alone, we have produced a stunning list of accomplishments.”
Applications of AI using advanced sperm sorting could be in excess of $300 million a year for the U.S. horse industry alone, said Jacobson. The market outside the U.S. could more than double those projections, he added.