Embryonic Transfer Device Could Ensure Northern White Rhino Survival
Harleen Singh and her UCSD team’s embryonic transfer robot might help save the northern white rhino population from extinction
Female northern white rhinos Najin and Fatu are the last two of their kind. While they remain protected on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, it will take the first southern white rhino surrogate to save the subspecies.
Meet Harleen Singh, a graduate student researcher at the University of California, San Diego working in collaboration with the San Deigo Zoo Nikita Kahn Rhino Rescue Center to build the solution for the last two: an embryonic transfer device. For the past year, her team has been in the process of designing a handheld, snake-like flexible robot that will be able to navigate through the 2-meter-long female rhino reproductive tract. The end goal is for the robotic device to implant a northern white rhino embryo into a southern white rhino surrogate.
By December 2019, the Avantea Laboratory in Italy advanced the global mission to save the northern white rhino population by successfully forming three “early-stage” embryos through in vitro fertilization (IVF). The IVF procedures in late 2019 entailed maturing Fatu’s harvested eggs in a culture dish and then injecting them with the sperm collected from past northern white rhino males. With the 2018 passing of Sudan, the last northern white male, fresh on the minds of conservationists and scientists, this first IVF success for northern white rhinos breeds momentum to achieve the impossible. Harleen can feel it.
“As science improves it’s important for us as people to care about our environment and be able to save it in ways that we didn’t think were possible before,” she said.
With the life span of a female northern white typically lasting between 40 to 50 years, Najin and Fatu are 31 and 20. They depend on an engineering feat in this decade for a new northern white rhino on Earth.
Harleen and her team might not need the decade, though. They hope to begin test procedures on a rhino by the end of 2020 or early 2021 to work toward the higher stake embryo transfers. COVID-19 restrictions on the number of allowed lab personnel did impact accessibility to the rhinos and UCSD engineering lab, but the team hopes that the lifting of restrictions will enable progress.
Just as conservation requires a global network of communication between rangers, conservancies, and scientists, Harleen found that her design drew heavily on communication with the biologists at the Nikita Kahn Rhino Rescue Center. She constantly brings them components of the device and eagerly receives their feedback. Inspired by hours of watching in-person rhino procedures, Harleen always puts how the product works with, and not against, the rhino body and operator at the forefront of her work.
“We want it to be as user-friendly for them as opposed to making the best engineering device,” Harleen said.
The research and implementation of this embryonic transfer device for rhinos might actually be transferred to help humans as well, explained Harleen. The research could be used to develop a clinical device for catheter-based surgeries. Harleen’s network of doctors at the University of California, San Diego, allows for this exploration.
“I think it’s a great opportunity because it’s a really adaptable project,” she said.
Adaptable.
Maybe this is engineering’s largest role in the fight for conservation. Harleen and her team have stripped the seemingly impossible of its boundaries and rewritten the impact the human brain can have on the planet. In moving with the challenges, a creative solution was born. To use one rhino subspecies to save another… that is adaptability.
There is innovative teamwork in every vein of this project: in the engineering, biology, and animals themselves.
