CellSense™ – A World's First
Delivery
Rod Claycomb explains:
The key breakthrough happened largely by accident. David Whyte, one of our research scientists, was looking around at all sorts of ways to measure SCC in milk.
Being the engineers that we were we were looking at sexy ways to do things – you know, all the new technologies – the latest and greatest. Some of those worked and some of them didn't.
A series of specifications had been developed for a suitable end product. These obviously included tight cost constraints but also that any reagents used should not be toxic. We didn't want any moving parts in contact with the milk, because it makes them difficult to clean, and what we produced had to be easy to use and it had to stand up to a dairy shed environment .
One day David came in to my office and he was carrying a National Mastitis Management Programme manual (SAMM) – the one that's given out to all farmers. He showed me a picture of this California Mastitis Test paddle. It had four little compartments, one for each quarter. The farmer squirts some milk from each quarter into the four wells and then he squirts some soap in on top of this, swirls it around and looks for a viscosity increase. If it turns from milky to egg whitish then there's a high somatic cell count.
There was a picture of one of these paddles in the manual and one of the quarters was really dark blue and a couple of the other ones were lighter blue. I said to David, 'Why can't we measure that?' David said, 'We can develop a simple optical sensor to do that!' And off he went back into the lab.
Well he came back with some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that it turned out that the colour in the picture had nothing to do with the somatic cell count – it was actually a protein stain. However the good news was that there was something in the viscosity increase and it looked like we might be able to measure that.
So things went on from there and we put our heads around some ways in which we could measure viscosity in an automated way. We took out a patent on the technique and things started to move from there.
Development phase
Going from the idea of measuring viscosity changes to producing a working prototype required an injection of additional skills and experience to the team. The planning model was one of constant evaluation and constant revision.
"It was build it... test it ...build it ... test it. Continually seeing how it stacked up against the specifications."
At each stage in the project criteria were set:
"We try not to move to the next stage till we've ticked all the boxes and we've tried to put enough of those stage gates in the process so that you don't get the project bleeding. If it takes too long to get to the next stage at some point in the process you've got to ask, 'are we ever going to get there?' Or you may decide that it's going to cost too much to get there. So that gives us a lot more opportunity to evaluate things in-house."
A variety of external consultants had to be engaged along the pathway, for example to look at regulatory requirements and in all of this Rod was continually going back to his stakeholder consultation groups.
"That was absolutely critical. I've tried to run the groups formally every two years – because markets change, and you can easily find yourself with your head down in the design space, and end up with something that really doesn't fit the market at all."
So three years into the project they were confident that they had something that they could put on a farm and that would do the job it was designed to do.
