In July, AB Vista kicked off a campaign to bring its stimbiotic product, Signis to markets in the Asia-Pacific region. The solution – which the company describes as the first of a new class of microbiome modulators – was originally launched in The Americas and Europe in 2019 and, as of November this year, can now also be found in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Philippines.
Signis’s entry into the region, as the company’s Global Marketing and Technical Director, Dr Tiago Tedeschi dos Santos explained to Feedinfo, benefitted from three years of learnings gathered in the product’s initial launch markets. This was combined with region-specific data to support local customers in its adoption and to further the concept of stimbiotics there as a gut health nutritional strategy that can improve the health and performance of monogastric livestock.
For today’s Industry Perspectives, Mr dos Santos gives a quick reminder of what stimbiotics are and how Signis has performed in the three years since its launch. We then dive into what the Asia-Pacific launch entailed, why China was absent from this roll-out, and findings from a recent broiler study in South Korea that looked at Signis’s impact in broilers challenged with necrotic enteritis.
[Feedinfo] Just to recap, could you give us a quick explanation of what stimbiotics are and how they can benefit monogastric gut health and overall resiliency.
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Dr Tiago Tedeschi dos Santos |
[Tiago dos Santos] Stimbiotics are a new class of feed additives that are delivered at low concentrations to signal and accelerate the fermentation of fibre in the lower gut. Animal feed is relatively high in carbohydrates, including starch and dietary fibre and protein, whereas the microbiome thrives better in an environment more abundant in fibre. The normal ileal digesta is a fibre-rich environment which encourages the microbiome to break down and ferment fibre. This process is amplified by Signis – a unique solution that accelerates the development of a fibre degrading microbiome so that more volatile fatty acids are produced for assimilation by the animal. |
The microbiome is a dense and highly complex community of micro-organisms. They play a crucial role in gut health and, more specifically, in the extraction of energy from undigested nutrients, and the development and maintenance of the immune system. Optimisation of the microbiome’s potential must consider the status of the feed when it reaches the gut and how the microbiome adapts to this. With this strategy we are aiming for the host microbiome to use feed dietary fibre more effectively by boosting or training the bacteria to use this substrate more readily; all of which should lead to improved gut function, enteric resilience, and performance.
[Feedinfo] When you first launched Signis in 2019, what was the market’s reaction to the stimbiotics concept and how have things changed in the three years since then? Was there a lot of market education that needed to be done in that time?
[Tiago dos Santos] What we have learnt over the last three years is that the benefits of better stimulating fibre fermentation go beyond just performance improvements. In our initial trials we did not measure these benefits in the way that we have been able to more recently. We have generated good information on the use of the product in conventional and challenged environments, which has helped us to better determine the benefits in different conditions, animal categories and production systems. In general, these other benefits will depend on the level of the challenge in the production system for that specific customer situation (i.e., what is the level of necrotic enteritis or dysbacteriosis in their animals). Educating customers to better understand these challenges and how they are affecting the overall profitability of their business has been crucial to the development of the stimbiotic concept and the benefits it can bring beyond performance. Especially as these challenges in commercial environments may not trigger fluctuations in performance in a constant way whereas subacute challenges that impact performance without a clear etymology are a great source of losses to customers.
[Feedinfo] How did Signis perform in those initial launch markets?
[Tiago dos Santos] What is now attracting a lot of interest is evaluating dietary fibre in a different way. We are used to thinking in terms of ‘crude fibre’, but as we move into a world without antibiotics and the need to sometimes select alternative ingredients, we are now beginning to separate fibre into its chemical components and functional properties.
To understand the functional properties, such as solubility and fermentability, we first need to ensure we can accurately measure the chemical composition of fibre for a wide variety of ingredients. This is something that we can do with our Near Infra-Red (NIR) spectroscopy service – which helps producers to quickly and accurately assess feed quality to optimise animal performance – and we are working with customers to better use this information when formulating diets.
We are seeing great success with Signis in the Americas, especially with use in nursery pigs and sows where the improved understanding of fibre’s impact on the performance of the animal and how to use Signis to boost those benefits have been key. Here, the development and use of the dietary fibre calibration via NIR and the dietary fibre calculator to estimate the daily intake of fibre have been key parts of our support to customers.
Customers have also been using the insight of the fibre concentration and characteristics in the diets to adapt and better use their feed additives. Signis usage has been done in combination with or substitution of other feed additives such as prebiotics, probiotics and butyric acids depending on the level of the challenge the customer observes and the financial benefit and cost of these feed additives. The effective substitution of other feed additives has been used successfully in poultry diets with extremely positive results in terms of cost and performance. This is a great success from our initial launches in these countries and we see huge potential for the product in these regions and segments.
[Feedinfo] You began rolling out the product in Asia-Pacific markets between July and November of this year. What did this roll-out entail and what are you hoping Signis will bring to customers there?
[Tiago dos Santos] We worked closely with our sales partners in Asia-Pacific to set up several seminars for customers in this region, with the topics focused not only on stimbiotics but also fibre sources in diets and the impact this has on gut health. We also discussed the value of capturing raw material fibre variability with NIR.
How we at AB Vista bring solutions to our customers is not only about the products but also entails the expertise on how to best apply their use, alongside services that support their application. We are also currently looking to expand this support with tools that help evaluate the gut health of the animals. We are very aware of and understand the need to develop local expertise and already have a good volume of published research done in Asia that we think will help our customers understand the benefit of Signis in their regional reality.
[Feedinfo] China, of course, is a huge market for feed additives. It is absent from this current roll-out for Signis. Are there plans to launch the product there? If so, where are you in that process?
[Tiago dos Santos] China is an extremely important market for AB Vista and our approach there, like elsewhere, has been to first understand the local and regional characteristics of the market before introducing a product. Considering stimbiotics, what we have done in China - and this is probably a good example of the importance of the Chinese market to AB Vista - is that we launched VistaPros, a stimbiotic product specifically made for the Chinese market. It was developed using local market research that included regular contact with local customers. And we are already seeing favourable results in initial commercial applications of the product there.
[Feedinfo] This roll-out is supported by a recent broiler study in South Korea that looked at Signis’s inclusion in broilers challenged with necrotic enteritis. What exactly did this trial entail and what were some of the key findings that you can share with us?
[Tiago dos Santos] In this study the objective was to evaluate Signis as a nutritional strategy to mitigate performance loss, the inflammatory response and gut lesions in birds challenged by an experimentally induced necrotic enteritis (NE). The trial aimed to evaluate the effects of Signis alone or combined with a blend of additives (probiotics, prebiotics, yeast mannans and essential oils) on performance, gut morphology and health parameters of broilers with NE and those without.
The results showed that Signis-fed birds were less affected by NE, with increased counts of beneficial bacteria in caecal content and reduced counts of pathogenic bacteria, which resulted in better gut integrity and a reduction of the inflammatory response. Birds fed Signis were also more resilient and performed better, showing a BW increase of 81g and an 11-point reduction in feed conversion ratio. Adding other additives on top of Signis did not improve performance or other parameters beyond Signis alone.
[Feedinfo] Where to next for Signis? What are the geographies you are eyeing to introduce Signis into in the near future?
[Tiago dos Santos] We now have good coverage across the globe with Signis, spanning most markets that we operate in. Our focus now is to support our customers with the application of Signis, and in evaluating dietary fibre and the impact this can have on performance and the microbiome. We will also be working to expand our services in this area to help customers choose the appropriate strategy for their situation.
Also, expanding our portfolio of products in the microbiome modulation and immune stimulation category is something we remain committed to. For example, following our agreement with Avivagen, we now have OxC beta – a beta-carotene oxidation solution – available in some regions, with Brazil, Thailand and the US to follow next. Combining both technologies, Signis and OxC-beta, has already delivered some positive results for us and great customer feedback.
Published in association with AB Vista
