Proof-of-Concept Research: Test Driving Ideas 🎙️
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This article written by Dr. Reynold Bergen, BCRC Science Director, originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of Canadian Cattlemen magazine and is reprinted on BeefResearch.ca with permission of the publisher.
This month’s column highlights three of the Beef Cattle Research Council’s proof-of-concept projects. This program funds inexpensive projects that can be completed in a year, with the goal of determining whether a technology, practice or hare-brained research idea holds enough potential to merit scaling up into a larger project.
Some proof-of-concept projects answer the question.
Vaccines can fail due to avoidable human factors (e.g., not following label directions regarding storage, mixing or administration), animal factors (e.g., the immune system can’t respond to the vaccine due to excessive stress or inadequate nutrition) or microbial factors (e.g., the vaccine formulation hasn’t changed to keep up with the microbe’s evolution). That last factor— “vaccine strains don’t match the circulating field strains” is easy to blame, hard to prove and even harder to fix.
The first step is to find out if it’s likely. In one BCRC proof-of-concept project, a research team in Saskatchewan sequenced three key genes in bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV)—one of several viruses involved in bovine respiratory disease (BRD)—from two modified live vaccines and compared them to 43 strains of BRSV collected from sick cattle. They found that the DNA sequences in these key genes were quite similar between the vaccine strains and the Canadian field strains, suggesting they are closely related and the vaccine should still be providing good protection. This approach should work for other modified live viral vaccines.
Some proof-of-concept projects find something that is completely unexpected.
Septic arthritis (i.e., infected joints) often accompanies BRD. A team of researchers from Saskatchewan studied septic arthritis, intending to characterize the full range of microbes involved. Using DNA tests to identify the microbes involved is tricky, because 99% of the DNA in the sample is from the animal. The first step was to run the sample through a series of “filters” to remove the host animal DNA. Then they screened the remaining DNA and compared it to microbial sequences that had already been reported to the international genomic databases. This revealed some new DNA sequences from the septic arthritis samples that bore absolutely no resemblance to any known microbial DNA sequences.
They also checked the new mystery DNA sequences against the published bovine genome databases to make sure this wasn’t just cattle DNA that had slipped through the filters. They didn’t find a match there, either. Excited by the possibility that they may have discovered an entirely new family of bacteria, they sought to characterize these mysterious new bacterial species.
Long story short, they discovered that the newly discovered DNA sequences weren’t from any mysterious new bacteria after all. They really were from cattle. The researchers were initially misled because the cattle genomic database is limited. The first attempt to sequence the bovine genome took the combined efforts of 300 scientists from 25 countries over six years to sequence a single Hereford cow. As technology improved, more cattle have been sequenced. But there are a lot of breeds and a lot of genetic diversity in the world’s cattle population, cattle DNA sequence databases are incomplete, and these researchers temporarily stumbled into this knowledge gap. They turned this lemon into lemonade by developing a better procedure to help other research teams to screen out host DNA. Once they were back on track, they found a bovine hokovirus that had never been reported in septic arthritis cases before but is commonly found in lung samples from Western Canadian feedlot cattle with BRD. Future research may determine whether hokovirus plays a role in BRD or lameness.
Some proof-of-concept projects prove the concept is promising and point the way towards next steps.
With record-high cattle values and increasing pressure to reduce antimicrobial use in livestock production, feedlot operators would benefit from better ways to rapidly and accurately identify cattle that need to be treated (and those that don’t). The best way to detect BRD in feedlot cattle is still the old way—riding or walking the pen, pulling cattle that don’t look right and treating the ones with a fever. But “best” doesn’t mean “perfect.”
On average, about 62% of cattle pulled for BRD really have BRD (based on much more elaborate and accurate diagnostic tests that are too slow and costly for commercial use). That means a lot of cattle that are treated for BRD may not need to be.
Pen checkers aren’t bad at their jobs—it is just an extremely difficult job to do well, and they have millions of years of evolution stacked against them. Predators pick on the sick, lame, old and young, so cattle have evolved to act healthy even when they’re not feeling well. But their body still responds to disease, even if they don’t always show visible signs.
One of the body’s many responses to inflammation and infection is to release haptoglobin from the liver into the blood. A research team in Alberta sought to test whether a chute-side haptoglobin test could help refine BRD treatment decisions in a commercial feedlot. They found that haptoglobin levels were lowest in healthy control cattle and higher in first pulls that had a fever and were treated. More interestingly, cattle that had the highest haptoglobin levels at first pull were also more likely to relapse and be retreated or die. More work is needed to turn this into a rapid, user-friendly, chute-side test, but the concept appears promising.
From this perspective, proof-of-concept projects are always a success. Sometimes they answer the exact question they asked. Other projects don’t work out as planned, but they nearly always learn something useful, with a minimal outlay of producer dollars.
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