North Richmond's Catalina Genetics leads the way in Australian equine cloning

The business of cloning horses for competition in a variety of disciplines has grown in Australia over recent years and one North Richmond-based company has been at the forefront of the revolution.

Catalina Genetics has helped the industry grow and in September last year welcomed the first horse cloned on Australian shores.

"It's really gratifying to see something you've put so much hard work into like this come off and the reasons why we are doing it make it so special as well," Catalina Genetics' managing director John Farren-Price said.

"From my perspective, cloning isn't breeding, it's just making the very-best genetics more widely available to everyone.

"Many years ago, some of the best genetics from Australia were exported around the world and an unfortunate by-product of that was the fact we lost a lot of good genetics.

"You can't import embryos because they don't freeze easily but with cloning, we can bring back a lot of those really good genetics to Australia, which will give local breeders the chance to breed from them again."

Read Also:

A polo enthusiast at heart, Mr Farren-Price said his company's creation came after the loss of a treasured mare.

"My partner and I started off in 2016 doing retraining for polo and we had an amazing polo mare, but she died in late 2017," he said.

"By then I had heard a bit about cloning and knew the basics of it so took cells from her and started the process of building a business to be able to clone in Australia.

"Through 2018, I found a very good embryologist in South America, Jenin Cortez Polanco who was keen to come out ,so we started building a laboratory here in North Richmond, which was finished by the end of that year and Jenin has been a really important part of our team."

Although common in Australia's polo circles, Mr Farren-Price said cloning for other horse sports had become more prevalent since gaining approval from the Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI) in 2012.

"If you really want to compete and win in polo you've got to be cloning and then putting them onto stallions, which will improve the breed," he said.

"Thoroughbred racing is probably out because they are pretty clear on what they do and don't want in their studbook.

"However, all of the Olympic sports have approved cloning and so we're cloning a showjumping horse and a dressage horse because it is prevalent in those sports and approved by the FEI since 2012.

"Broadly, it's approved by the FEI for any Olympic sport and I compare it to the Australia II winged keel because I feel like it is the technology we need to stay competitive with the other strong nations in the sports like Argentina."

Following on from the company's maiden success in September, Catalina is expecting a second foal in March and has seven cloned pregnancies in the past two months, which are due to foal from October 2021.

"It has been an exciting period for us and in addition to cloning, , we're the first people in Australia to perform equine ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection), which is basically the equivalent of horse IVF," Mr Farren-Price said.

"ICSI is probably one of the biggest game changers in equine breeding in Australia because it improves the chances of fertilisation by taking the egg from the mare, taking it back to the lab and inserting the sperm into the egg and then transferring it back to the mare."

Love agricultural news? Sign up for The Land's free daily newsletter.