May we present: Dr. Kilian Simmet, Minitube Germany

Minitube started as a family business, and, despite its size, it still is today with the third family generation working in management. Being part of this third generation, Kilian Simmet took up his position as Division Manager Product Management & Pharmaceutical Production recently.
 

Due to your family background, artificial reproduction was an issue for you from a young age. When did you realize that you wanted to work in this field yourself?

Yes, already as kids we perfectly knew what the family business was all about, we knew how modern animal production and artificial insemination work. And of course, the family business also influenced my choice to study agriculture very early. During my studies, the field of animal production was always the most interesting to me, as it unifies all the aspects of agriculture from producing feed, designing housing, physiology, marketing and of course reproduction itself. I had my first intense contact with artificial reproduction technologies when I was working on my master’s thesis on freezing boar semen. 
 

Talking about your education, what academical and professional stages did you go through before you decided to join Minitube?

I finished my bachelor’s in 2010 at the University of Hohenheim. Before going into the master’s program of animal production, I spent 9 months on a beef farm in Uruguay to gain practical experience while establishing a feedlot there. After finishing the master’s thesis in 2013, I enrolled in the doctoral program at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (LMU), where I started to work on bovine embryos. I received the doctoral degree in 2017 and as I enjoyed scientific work very much, I applied for a research fellowship and received funding for a research group at the Chair for Molecular Animal Breeding and Biotechnology at the LMU, where I stayed as a post-doc until I joined Minitube’s team last year.
 

What are your core tasks as Division Manager Product Management & Pharmaceutical Production at Minitube?

Our product management team is continuously improving existing products and has the lead in new product developments, where steady contact with our customers and the scientific community as well as close observation of the market are our key input sources. Our experts offer technical support to our customers. We attend and investigate every complaint and strive for quick and reliable solutions and we collect and disseminate know-how throughout the whole Minitube group. The department of pharmaceutical production produces boar semen extender and liquid media in our GMP certified facilities. Research and development of new media and improvement of existing formulations are also a central task in this department. Naturally, product management and pharmaceutical production have many overlapping projects, responsibilities, and areas of expertise. As Division Manager I aim to combine the expertise from product management with the competences from pharmaceutical production to create synergies. This drives continuous improvement and new developments in Minitube’s media. 
 

Together with your team, you are continuously working on making artificial reproduction even more efficient and sustainable. What topics and projects are you currently focusing on? Can you give us a few examples?

In 2022, we launched two new products that improve the usage of antibiotics in commercial boar semen production. One is called “OBS” (organic bactericidal supplement) that we add to Androstar® Premium. OBS allows reducing the concentration of antibiotics by 50% with the same effective control of bacterial contamination, which improves sperm quality especially during long term storage and reduces the risk of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The second one is called “ADA” (accurate dosage of antibiotics), a new concept in processing boar semen. The concept is fairly simple: by adding the antibiotics in a second dilution step, every diluted ejaculate contains the exact same amount of antibiotics, independent of the dilution rate. To implement that in an everyday production, we did our best to make this process as easy as possible by designing a special package for antibiotics (the ADA pouch), a specially tailored SmartDispenser for the second dilution step and a calculation module for Prism10 lab management software, enabling the highest degree of automation. Using this concept has many advantages, but to me the most important one is the increase of biosecurity through accuracy, while at the same time a reduction of the safety margin in antibiotic concentration is possible, leading to a decrease of antibiotic consumption.
 

What are the main challenges for the future?

Sustainability is a major challenge, especially regarding the consumables used in AI. We are investigating alternative raw materials that are not fossil-based, biodegradable and meet the requirements we have in the industry without compromise – a tough but achievable challenge. I also think that the preservation of sperm cells will become more and more challenging, as genomic selection not always favors the reproductive qualities of the male. For that we’ll have to optimize our existing procedures and media, but we also will come up with new concepts to maintain and increase the efficiency of AI, which is the core interest of our customers.