15 March 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything — how we move around our cities, interact with our colleagues, and eat our meals.
For Italy’s Vetagro — a company which describes itself as “a small team of researchers with big ideas” — the severity of the lockdown of spring 2020 and the mobilisation of the scientific community behind the search for a cure were catalysts to a broader rethink of the role of research, not only within their own operations, but within society itself. “The rapid development of Covid vaccines, which became available in record time, made clear to everyone the importance of science and biotechnology and how this will become even more critical in the times to come,” observes Dr. Ester Grilli, Vice President for Nutrition and Health at Vetagro.
Inspired by this example, the company has been investing to grow its already-formidable in-house research capabilities, with the aim of creating new opportunities for young, talented biotechnologists and other researchers, and of providing customers with evidence-based products and services. In a recent conversation with Feedinfo, Dr. Grilli shared how this focus on research is helping to shape the Vetagro of the post-COVID era.
[Feedinfo] How much are you investing in R&D, and how has that figure evolved over the last, say, 10 years?
[Dr. Ester Grilli] We believe that the key to Vetagro’s competitiveness is science applied to nutrition.
Internally, we don’t consider the most relevant metric to be the budget spent on R&D, but rather the number of patents and peer-reviewed publication accepted and published in respected journals, a process we consider essential to prove to the industry that our science is as “unbiased” as possible.
Still, to give you an idea, our company size quadrupled in the last 10 years, and our R&D investments went beyond this figure. Now we can count on cell-cultures labs, microbiological labs, molecular biology and chemical/technology labs, with more people involved and more to come. This is a unique set-up for a medium-sized company like Vetagro.
[Feedinfo] You have said that the company is built on a foundation of R&D, and that you have had a strong commitment to this since the beginning. Can you tell us about that journey?
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Dr. Ester Grilli
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[Dr. Ester Grilli] Vetagro was founded by a group of professors from the University of Bologna and the University of Piacenza in the early ’80 with the mission of developing market-ready solutions to provide metabolizable amino acids and nutrients to dairy cows. The first product that was delivered to the marketplace was Timet®, a rumen-protected methionine, which remains one of our best sellers to this day. The second product that became available was called Florabovis® and was the result of a partnership with Dr. Peter Van Soest, a giant of ruminant nutrition and one of the most revered professors at Cornell University.
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[Feedinfo] What should we expect out of your new product pipeline going forward?
[Dr. Ester Grilli] In the near future, we will have to face many challenges that will impose us the need to re-consider how we eat, work and live. What happened over the last year and what is still going on will surely affect the food business. We already had to witness a decrease in meat consumption due to restaurants being locked down, a sharp increase in raw materials cost, and an economic crisis that is waiting ahead of us; all of this will make consumers revise their food choices and preferences. Besides that, viruses and bacteria will find it easier to gain ground as the industry gives up the weapons we traditionally used to battle them (such as antibiotics or pharmaceutical solutions). All these things considered, I am convinced that sustainability, green economy and precision nutrition will be at the basis of every product development, including Vetagro’s.
[Feedinfo] One demonstration of Vetagro’s commitment to the science of animal nutrition and health is your dedication to publishing your research in peer-reviewed outlets. Why does Vetagro think this is an important commitment to make?
[Dr. Ester Grilli] “Publish or perish” was one of the first things I was taught when I started my PhD in 2003. Back then publishing was vital for my academic career, today publishing is vital for our company’s reputation. In fact, to some extent, we prefer to eschew the classic marketing approach of others in this field and instead build our reputation through the studies we pursue. The publication process is then the greatest tool to support this approach.
But I want to be clear here: what I mean with publishing is not writing an abstract for a congress or a newsletter for a magazine; I mean submitting experiments and data to the review of our peers, who will judge the quality of our work and decide whether or not the data and the scientific approach are sound and worth the publication in a respected journal. In this way, our partners and customers have a third-party independent guarantee of the validity of our conclusions and how these impact the state of the art. We aim to investigate and publish on the mechanisms of actions that are at the basis of the ingredients we use to develop our products. This also helps our customers to make an informed decision. As an example: would you get the Covid vaccine (or any other medication) without seeing the data about how it works and the presumed efficacy? I would not; so why would my customers buy a product without knowing what it is in there and how it works?
The same logic applies to patent filing; we file patents to protect our innovation, and at the same time to serve as an assurance of transparency to our customers.
When it comes to using this as a metric for our success, we aspire to the quality of the publications rather than the quantity of them. We carefully select journals with high impact factors for most of our papers. Last year, because we had to stop our activity in the lab for a few months, we took the opportunity to focus more on the data from our latest experiments and we were able to submit about one manuscript a month for the whole of 2020. All have been published in international peer-reviewed journals.
Of course, the final validation of our theories is always up to the animals. At the end of the day, it is the results in the field which decide who has the best science!
[Feedinfo] In what ways is Vetagro investing in recruiting new talent into the industry? Can you tell us about these programs: when they started, what they consist of, and the results they’ve had so far?
[Dr. Ester Grilli] Because of our academic background, most of the people working on the tech team (either in R&D or in the technical office) are PhDs. We believe doctoral programs, if adequately structured, are an important step in one’s career development. After university, most people don’t know how to approach their career and may still have a lot to learn about operating in the workforce. In a PhD program, students are empowered to be fully responsible for their own success while being mentored by someone who can guide them in the best way. When I did my PhD, I had the most formative experience of my career, tough but rewarding. For this reason, a few years ago, Vetagro decided to allocate the budget to finance two PhD students every year for a 3-year doctoral program in collaboration with various universities. Once the student has concluded the program, which is completed partly at the university and partly in our labs, we may proceed by integrating them into our team. This is a win-win situation: the young scientists have a one-of-a-lifetime chance to work in a stimulating environment with concrete job opportunities, and we have the chance to foster new talents and engage bright minds on the hard questions facing the animal production industry.
[Feedinfo] Vetagro is also proud of the gender diversity of its team. Why is this a priority for Vetagro? Have you got any tips for building and maintaining inclusive teams?
[Dr. Ester Grilli] We believe in diversity to be the best asset for a company. From an evolutionary standpoint, diverse systems have the best chances to survive and propagate. Think about microbiota, the more diverse the better! Jokes aside, agriculture has been traditionally driven by older male decision-makers, and although recently things are slowly moving in a different direction, we feel there is still more work to do. Women can bring lots of different perspectives to the workplace, especially when it comes to empathy, precision and organizational skills. Nevertheless, we also strongly believe in the beauty of mixing genders and cultures; this is where the different perspectives on a subject can best contribute to solving a problem or creating an opportunity. Taking as example our team: it includes people from all the corners of the world, with different stories and different experiences. During our meetings, we can easily have people speaking more than 10 different languages in the same room!
We also believe that a sector like agriculture, traditionally slow to implement innovation, would benefit the most from the energy and new ideas that young people can bring. Our Italian heritage inspires us to reflect on and cherish what our parents and grandparents have left us—whether in terms of knowledge, or culture, or the natural environment. Our mission is to keep finding new ways, new strategies and new solutions to preserve this heritage and make it better for the next generations to come. It is a big challenge, but we are up to it!
Published in association with Vetagro.
