Preventing livestock disease outbreaks
A new ag tech startup aims to ensure healthier swine herds in Nebraska and beyond, key to an industry that generates more than $60 billion annually.
DARO, housed at Nebraska Innovation Campus, provides noninvasive, whole-herd disease surveillance with molecular analysis tools – a major advance over conventional monitoring methods, which use blood or oral fluid samples from a sample of pigs. The company focuses on early disease detection, particularly for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, the most economically damaging virus for swine producers.
“The pathogen surveillance we’ve developed gives us the ability to take certain sample types for livestock, specifically swine, and understand if there’s PRRS or other pathogens present for an early detection method,” said Josh DeMers, DARO’s chief operating officer.
“Our goal is to make pathogen data available and accessible just like people interact with weather reports and forecasts,” said Kristen Bernhard, DARO founder and CEO. “We want it early and accurate.”
The technology is timely as producers keep an eye on African swine fever, an exceptionally destructive viral threat that isn’t yet in the U.S. but is present in the Caribbean. Early detection is vital, as there are no treatments or vaccines against the disease.
Our goal is to make pathogen data available and accessible just like people interact with weather reports and forecasts.
Kristen Bernhard
Bernhard, who previously managed the Pathogens Genomics laboratory at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, leveraged multiple University of Nebraska economic development supports to launch DARO. They include The Combine, a statewide initiative supporting high-growth entrepreneurs in food and agriculture, and NIC’s BioTech Connector lab facility. The company’s surveillance technology is independently developed and fully proprietary to DARO. The startup has received more than $1 million in local venture capital investments to produce a product to test for one of the most common diseases in pigs.
DARO reflects the value of uniting multiple scientific and development backgrounds. Bernhard’s background in population genetics was foundational in her developing DARO’s technology.
Bailey Barcal, director of laboratory operations, also brings experience gained at UNMC, where she was a medical laboratory scientist in the Emerging Pathogens Laboratory. Alison Neujahr, the lead genomics researcher, earned a Ph.D. at UNL in complex biosystems.
On the business side, DeMers, former program manager of The Combine, provides startup knowledge. Rick Knudtson, an angel investor, has tech entrepreneurship expertise.