Growing up on a small sheep and cattle farm in New Zealand is a world apart from growing up on an Australian Outback station. Sure, I had access to guns, horses and motorbikes to learn how to ride, shoot and drive but there were no helicopters, snakes, spiders or rolling the swag out under the huge outback sky. Practising as a veterinarian in a primarily dairy farming focused part of New Zealand is also a world apart from practising as a veterinarian in the Outback but the greatest thing about a veterinary qualification is that it opens a huge number of doors and one has lead me to become the founder of a company with an aim of solving one of the longest standing unmet therapeutic needs in the beef industry.

Lets head back to ~2013 when I was sitting in a room in Mt Isa listening to a room of outback producers talk about stock management in the outback. While the focus of the discussions was around the reproductive management of these vast properties, many other aspects were covered. The more I listened the more I learned about the management challenges of the tropical wet/dry season combined with the huge scale of these properties. This meeting was setup because the R&D group I led at the time was looking to develop a non-surgical chemical sterilisation ear implant for female beef cattle. Central to the success of every R&D development aimed to solve a problem is working out if anyone cares, is anyone going to pay for it and why. OK so who better to ask than the end user customers!

This project failed to develop a commercializable solution for several reasons but I found the failure of this long acting contraception project really started to get under my skin. I love solving problems and as evidenced by multiple failures in this space, this was one tough technical problem to solve. It wasn't that technology platforms didn't exist, but no group had yet found the "secret sauce" required to provide commercialisable outcomes (i.e. ~12 mth duration of contraception delivered at a commercialisable cost).

I found myself pitching Sorensis and the contraception concept at the Kansas City Corridor conference in 2022 and I headed out to my network and re-connected with an old colleague of 20 years (Dr Rob Hunter). Rob had worked with a startup called Pendant Biosciences Inc. (www.pendantbio.com) and believed their approach to providing polymer skeletons with advanced functionalisation characteristics could be worth a look. The match between the three parties was that Sorensis bought significant animal health expertise along with a major customer problem and Pendant had the potential to use the unique adjustable capabilities of their next generation polymer technology to build a solution. It could be stated that the rest is history but I prefer Winston Churchill's quote he used during his famous "The few" speech that stated "History will be kind to me because I intend to write it"