Disease Monitoring and Plant and Animal Health

GNE: Hello, everyone. It’s Steve Melito from Go Natural Education here. Today, we’re talking to Dave Alburty and Dave Goad from InnovaPrep, a Missouri-based company that makes microbiological sample preparation tools. Dave and Dave, thanks for being here

INP: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

GNE: Great. So, we’ll talk about what InnovaPrep does and its relationship to farming, but I’d like to start with a statistic and some sound effects, if I may, and I’m going to go in reverse order. I’m not sure if you can hear birds chirping, but I’m working out of my home office here on the farm and I’ve got some chicks in a playpen, so hopefully they won’t be too distracting, but I think it’s appropriate because of the statistic I want to mention.

It was in the news this morning about the bird flu – a highly pathogenic variety that was detected at a large egg Farm in Iowa. There are 4 million chickens that are going to be destroyed as part of the effort to contain this disease, so animal health is clearly a very important thing for not just live livestock operator, but the family farmer as well.

I just want to set the stage here, and then to be clear with folks that InnovaPrep doesn’t make detectors. What you make is for the front end of sampling and sample preparation. Is that right?

INP: Right. That’s true. We help avoid the “garbage in, garbage out” syndrome. If you have don’t have good sampling and sample prep, you don’t get a good analytical result and so, you could easily miss something that’s there and that could be a problem in your flock or your herd.

GNE: For sure. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the larger livestock operations again because they’re in the news more often. When a large livestock operator suspects the presence of diseases, what do they do? And where do your products come in?

INP: Large-scale operators like feed lots typically have staff with veterinarians that are on call. They’ll take the samples, and those will be processed. Usually, they’re sent out, often to animal disease diagnostics labs. That’s where the actual detection process occurs. Some facilities have ACC-credited laboratories where they do sample testing in-house. 

We are involved in the concentration process. We are focused on being able to detect very small levels of specific pathogens. We’ll go into more details as we move forward.

GNE: Good. If you’re a small-scale farmer like me, or a rancher, is your technology simple enough to use? Or do you need to be a big operation with skilled technicians and folks like that?

INP: We can go down to the smallest scale using our air samplers to collect samples that a farmer or rancher then sends to a laboratory. It’s like what you would do with a mold sample at your house, or with a radon sample, or something like that. You’d use a sampler for a limited amount of time when there’s a concern and simply mail them to a partner laboratory that starts the sample tracking and reporting. Then you get back your results.

GNE: You mentioned airborne pathogens. Let’s talk about a technology that I should have called out by name: AirPrep. Did I get that right?

INP:  Yes, it’s called AirPrep and it’s for sampling airborne pathogens.

GNE: How does it work?  What are some of the types of pathogens that you would try to target for, say, chickens, cows, or hogs?

INP: For any of them, there can be airborne transmission – the same as for humans. Those pathogens can be breathed out. You mentioned highly pathogenic avian influenza. That’s a good example in barns. It can be transmitted that way, so our AirPrep technology can be deployed to use our small samplers to collect samples at the ventilation end. You can monitor constantly for anything to show up, whether it’s pathogenic avian influenza or any of the other viruses or bacteria that are of similar concern.

GNE: Can you tell me more about the device, what it looks like, and where you put it in the barn?  Do you mount it on the wall? Do you do you put on a table?  How does it all come together?

INP:  The AirPrep Cub Sampler is the simplest to use and it’s the least expensive. It’s about the size of a coffee can – maybe a little smaller. You just unscrew the top and install the filter, which is about the size of a hockey puck. Then you screw the top back on and turn it on. It’s got a timer, so you let it run.

It’s also got a little hangar, so you can hang it like a Christmas ornament down by the fan end of the house. It’s also got legs, so you can set it on a central location platform, on the floor, or even on a table, and let it operate. When the time’s up, you just collect the sample and put it in the mailer. It’s all dry. There’s no liquid to worry about, so there’s no leaking.

The filter I mentioned is an electrostatic collector. It’s kind of like the ultra-allergen filter that might be in your furnace. It will collect particles all the way from the very smallest viruses all the way up to exhaled breath particles containing bacteria and other things that might be concerning you.  

GNE: Can you use this outdoors in a pasture, or is this for indoor use only?

INP: We’ve had some use cases that we talked about that were outdoors and indoors. We’ve also had some collaboration with researchers who have looked at things like the SARS Cov-2 airborne virus in different areas, capturing that and being able to analyze those samples.

Some people are working with environmental pathogens and viruses that come from different kinds of sources. For example, there’s one that involves bats, among other things. There’s a lot of diversity in how this can be used with respect to agriculture and sampling at animal facilities.

It’s very easy to use and I show it to people and give them a very brief tutorial. Then they’re able to just take off and run with it. So, the ability to use that in lots of different animal scenarios is good. It’s powerful. It could allow you to do things like bird flu monitoring and so forth, but there are other pathogens out there that I think have the potential to be used for this – like respiratory viruses in cattle, shipping diseases, and BVDV.

GNE: Do you think it could be used in, say, a feedlot – a place where a lot of animals are close together?

INP: It’s a potential use case if you have the proper separation between animals lots. In feed lots, they pen animals into groups. That’s one of the things the system has a lot of potential for. You can take samples from these different groups. You could have a sampler set up in a particular pen or multiple pens.

The product that comes out of the sampler could be pulled and then used for a larger area screening. Then you go back and look at specific pens later. So, it has a lot of power at both the pen level and at a larger scale. It’s also hardened for weather.

There’s a certain level at which you’ll start to ingest some water into the air sampler, but you could dunk that thing in a bucket of bleach to sanitize it and keep things rolling. So, yes, you can use it outside. Indoors, it’s been used in animal housing applications. You can also use it in sampling around algae growth ponds to determine whether there’s concern about GMO escape.

GNE:  Do you have a use case here?

INP: With the one I mentioned, they took four samplers and put them around an algae growth pond that was GMO algae. They wanted to make sure that it wasn’t escaping the location. It was a state regulatory requirement. They had to do this monitoring. So that is one specific GMO air application.

In terms of animal applications, USDA put six of these sampler around animal composting piles. There have been some EPA studies, too, around animal composting operations. One of them was a case of potential FMDV outbreak in thousand cattle. They dig a long trench, put them in there, and cover them up with compost and try to compost them in place. They wanted to understand if there was an escape of the pathogen from that, so they simulated it. They were able to detect the DNA kilometers away. 

USDA did this with poultry at chicken farms in Georgia, too. They put six of these air samplers around the composting chickens to determine whether pathogens were escaping the pile in an airborne fashion and exposing other chickens. They determined that it wasn’t happening. I guess that’s success.

GNE: We’ve been talking about the airborne aspect, but there’s a fluid sample preparation technology as well. Could we talk about that, too?

INP: The FluidPrep system is focused on our concentrating pipette as well as a larger liquid volume concentrator. We call it the LVC (large volume concentrator). The concentrating pipette is able to able to take liquid samples. Depending on the quality of the sample, it can be about 3 liters and then concentrated into a volume that is less than a milliliter – usually less than a milliliter.

This gives you a very high volumetric concentration efficiency that allows you to detect pathogens in very low numbers. We just had a project with marine pathogens and were able to detect 10 to 100 pathogens in a liter of seawater.   

It’s also been used in wastewater analysis. During the SARS COV-2 pandemic, wastewater testing became a powerful tool for community surveillance monitoring. The signature that you would see in wastewater tended to precede the kind of events that you would see at a clinical level by anywhere from 4 to 10 days.

Those same strategies can be employed with animal health. For example, you can look at the wastewater runoff from animal facilities and prepare samples so that you can detect pathogens.  

The concentrating pipette and the LVC both work the same way. The liquid sample is pulled into hollow fibers that are in a tube. It’s like leaky soda straws inside a tube. You pull the sample into the leaky soda straws and they capture the particles that you’re interested in. After they’re captured, they’re eluted back out of the bores of those hollow fibers using a wet foam, which is a carbonated surfactant. Think of soapy Pepsi.

You can suck a whole bunch of samples through it and elute that or spit that out in a very small amount of fluid for analysis. That’s what makes it a powerful tool for quickly concentrating samples.  

Also, some of your listeners might be into aquaculture. It’s a big deal in farming, whether for land-based or sea-based or oyster farming. You want to protect your animals in the aquatic environment. With cattle and pigs, you’d be concentrating the air sample instead.

These air samples can be pulled and you could take several air samples that are flushed from that dry filter with a liquid for analysis. Then, you can concentrate them and really magnify your sensitivity for sampling around some large area. Maybe it’s a laboratory at a large-scale livestock production lab or a veterinary lab, or a clinical lab.   

Whether samples are sent in from an aquaculture basis or from an air sampling basis, or even from sampling things like irrigation water, everything is connected. Animals are connected to people through the air, through the water, through various surfaces. We call it the “poop loop”, and we look across the entire spectrum at the front end to help deliver results at the back end.

The LVC, or large volume concentrator, is interesting because it can handle volumes up to 100 liters. With the air concentrators, you can take what comes out of that and concentrate it even further. With the concentrating pipette, you can do the same thing. But with the LVC, you can do sequential concentrations and essentially get down to a less than 1 milliliters out of 100 milliliters of original sample water.

That’s a powerful sample preparation tool if you’re looking at irrigation water, but it’s also useful for soil because everything is connected in the “poop loop”. Our technology can be used to look for pathogens or microorganisms in the soil and for the dust in livestock facilities, which is one of the ways that things spread between animals. They’ll do their thing and then it will get stirred up in the air and the animals breathe it.

As far as the soil itself goes, you can take a sample and put it into a liquid mix that lets the non-target silt particles settle out. Or you can do a pre-filtration stop to clarify so that you can concentrate the bacteria and viruses. You basically make the soil into a wastewater-type liquid and then run it on the concentrating pipette. You’re extracting the biological materials from the soil first, and then concentrating them.

GNE: We’ve talked a lot about animal health. Could we talk about plant health as well, and do the technologies you provide have applications in greenhouses or out in the field?

INP: Yes. I took one of our Cub Samplers to a medical marijuana growing facility. It’s the biggest single-crop greenhouse I’ve been in, and it’s growing lots and lots of plants. You can sample the air there and look for organisms. In this facility, they were looking for the hop latent viroid but they were also looking for pollen. They were growing all female plants and wanted to find out if a hermaphrodite plant had formed and was pollinating the females because this would decrease the value of their crop.

It was a nice application to use the air sampler. You could collect samples at different locations within the facility. I did find one pollen grain that indicated there was a hermaphrodite somewhere in the operation. They probably had a hunter/killer mentality about how to find that thing.

In this greenhouse operation, they suspected that hop latent viroid could be spread by their irrigation water supply. They recirculate their water, filter it, and then reuse it for the hydroponics. That was one of the areas of suspicion between them doing the air sampling and the water sampling. You can gain control of your environment in large greenhouses   

The irrigation water is also significant because it loops back to soil analysis, which is important for plants from the standpoint of pathogens. A lot of the pathogens in plants are virus-related and it can be difficult to collect them. But our technology is very effective for being able to concentrate viruses and present that to a downstream analytical process, whether it’s polymerase chain reaction (PCR), quantitative PCR, or even sequencing. USDA did a study in 2018 and showed the efficacy of that exact approach.  

GNE: Are there any other case studies or use cases you’d like to mention that I haven’t asked you about, or given you an opportunity to discuss?

INP: A lot of folks use our equipment for what happens after the farm. You could call it farm to fork to pharmacy. But we’ve had a lot of success in looking at food in food processing plans. One of them recently was norovirus in berry production that is picked and then frozen. Leafy green are another favorite culprit for e. coli varieties.

Our instruments are good at taking those sorts of wash waters or rinse waters and sampling from food. You get a quick and sensitive analysis. You  get a result in the same shift and then, hopefully, can release the food down the line so that you’re not waiting and holding on to it. You don’t want to have to recall trucks either.

There are many strategies for trying to increase the shelf life of foods, and one of them is to get your analytical results as fast as you can. That’s where we can come in to help and, if you think about it, you’re also able to reduce refrigeration. Now you’re talking about having a positive impact on climate change, certainly your carbon footprint, and things like that.

In other words, our technology may have beneficial impacts in ways you can’t foresee when you first start looking at the use it.

GNE: When you think about how your technology compares to what’s available in the marketplace, is it the speed and ease-of-use that makes you different? What are the biggest pluses that you bring to the table?

INP: Our customers have the need for speed. That’s the main thing.  Our products are also used by the military, and they won’t use something unless it’s easy to use and not overly complicated. It can also save you money because a lot of the cost of laboratories is technician time. The frustration also costs them and if you can make their jobs easier, that makes the manager look good, too.

The cost savings matters to the CFO and has benefits all up the line. With our concentrating pipette and the methods that we’ve discussed, you can take a take what would be a two-day process with older methods and do it in a few hours.

During the pandemic, we increased workflow tremendously for public health labs. It became a popular method and the same holds true for other methods that you could compare it to. The speed factor is important, and so is the ease of use. You don’t need a dedicated technician or someone with a high level of expertise for sample collection.

GNE: Last question. If there’s a smaller farm out there that is interested in your technology and wants to learn more about it, what should they do? Go to your website and reach out to you? How do you like to interact with folks?

INP: The easiest way is to go to our website and go to customer service and talk to somebody. You can talk to a real person, which will probably be a relief to them for sure.