A Canadian company has developed a potential alternative to prophylactic antibiotic use in livestock.
Avivagen president Cameron Groome said the product’s development is well timed, given ongoing concerns about antibiotic resistant bacteria, antibiotic use in livestock and food company initiatives to use meat from animals never given antibiotics.
The feed additive, called OxC-beta, is derived from carotenoids, which are the pigments that make carrots orange and tomatoes red.
Groome said peer-reviewed research in Canada and several Asian countries shows OxC-beta improves immune and anti-inflammatory functions in poultry and hogs.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
“You’re actually strengthening the immune function of the animal in such a way that it doesn’t need to be fed antibiotics to stay healthy in a production environment, and that’s what we’ve been demonstrating,” said Groome.
The product was developed by Graham Burton and Janusz Daroszewski, Canadian chemists with the National Research Council. They were studying carotenoids and explored the non-vitamin health properties of certain fruits and vegetables that were not explained by anti-oxidant properties.
Their research led to development of a powder comprising 10 percent fully oxidized beta-carotene that can be added to livestock feed.
“We’re able to see protective and growth promotion effects that are equivalent in some cases, superior in others, to what is observed with many of the antibiotic regimens,” he said.
Groome said proof of concept work on efficacy has been done on OxC-beta at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, and the most advanced commercial applications are likely to be in hogs and poultry.
Multiple trials on those species have been conducted in Asia, where Groome said several countries, including Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam and China, have expressed interest in registration and use.
He said a large study in Vietnam found that OxC-beta boosted growth in piglets by more than 20 percent over a control group in the first month after weaning. A standard antibiotic regimen produced a six percent growth boost compared to the control.
“We’ve got every reason to believe there would be tremendous applications of this in dairy cattle, beef cattle, laying hens and even aquaculture, but we don’t yet have commercial protocols that we can really say, ‘yes, this is exactly how you should use the product, this is the optimum dose level.’
“But we’ve really reached that point in swine and broilers now,” Groome said.
Product pricing will be competitive with that of antibiotic growth promoters, he added, which is about $5 per tonne of feed to which OxC-beta is added.
“There are natural analogs to our product and there is an inherent safety to them because they’ve been a part of the food chain for as long as there have been plants making pigments,” he said.
Groome said the product is manufactured in Asia because a lack of Canadian registration means it can’t be exported.
“I’d love to be in a position to set up a production facility here in Canada because we’ll ultimately need a lot more than we can currently supply, but again, we would need Canadian registration in order to bring that home,” he said.
“I wish I could say with certainty that we will be pursuing (registration in) Canada, but there’s a number of feed products, novel antibiotic alternatives that people would love to market in Canada and it’s not a clearly defined pathway for registration.
“For patriotic reasons, we’ll certainly pursue it, but economically, there are a lot of places that are screaming for these products and are welcoming you to pursue registration.”
