As we near the end of 2022, it feels like the right time to take stock and reflect on a momentous year for Benchmark Animal Health.
It was back in January that we made our first major announcement of the year. Along with leading salmon farming company, Cermaq Group AS, we were awarded funding from the Research Council of Norway as part of a collaborative project into developing a vaccine against the salmon diseases caused by Tenacibaculum bacteria. This funding facilitated vital research into novel vaccines with huge potential benefits for the aquaculture industry – in terms of both fish health and welfare. Vaccine research continues to be an area of priority for us in 2023, reflecting the industry’s unmet need.
Animal welfare underpins all of our activity at Benchmark, and it was an honour to be nominated in the Welfare Category at this year’s Aquaculture Awards back in May. This recognition is a testament to the dedication of our whole team through their delivery of Ectosan® Vet and CleanTreat®, our innovative solution for sea lice.
In many ways, this has been a year in focus for Ectosan® Vet and CleanTreat®. We marked our first full year of commercial deployment halfway through 2022, having supported farmers along the length of the Norwegian coastline. Over the course of the year, we have been working in collaboration with our customers to enhance the efficiency of the system. More than 100,000 tons of fish have been treated with Ectosan® Vet since its launch, and over 1 million m3 of water purified via CleanTreat®. That equates to 400 Olympic size swimming pools!
In 2022, the Norwegian Medicines Agency also granted Benchmark a variation to its Marketing Authorisation, enabling the re-use of treatment water for a second batch of fish. In practice, this enables sustainable practices, increases efficiencies for farmers and promotes animal welfare. This news was closely followed by Benchmark receiving a Marketing Authorisation for Ectosan® Vet in the Faroe Islands. We were also granted the import tolerance for Ectosan® Vet’s active ingredient in the United States. Concurring with levels set in Europe, this positive move enables our customers to maintain regulatory compliance for fish treated with Ectosan® Vet.
We’re constantly innovating to seek sustainable solutions. Earlier this year, following 18 months of collaboration, we led a first of its kind trial to test the use of our medicine Salmosan® Vet with our water purification system, CleanTreat®, supported by Mowi, the University of Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture and the Sustainable Aquaculture Innovation Centre. The trial took place at a Mowi site in Scotland, and we were delighted to announce that the results were positive. There were also updates to the use of Salmosan® Vet in Canada, with a three-hour treatment time label change and an amendment to the number of treatments permitted per year.
It is incredibly difficult to summarise all of our achievements this year, and this represents only a fraction of the highlights of a year underpinned by strategic growth. In an important move, we announced the formation of the Salmon Hub. This combined our commercial and marketing functions of Genetics and Health to form two teams working on sales and marketing for the complete Atlantic salmon product portfolio.
It has also been a year of getting out and about, visiting our customers on-site, and attending conferences across the globe. It is incredibly refreshing to be collaborating with others in the aquaculture industry, with one of my personal highlights including speaking at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum on the economics of sea lice management. At the 2022 Sea Lice Conference in the Faroe Islands, the Benchmark team hosted a technical lunch focused on ‘recognising sea lice management challenges and how we together influence the future’, which received great feedback from attendees.
Thank you to all of our team for your hard work and dedication this year, and I hope you have an enjoyable festive break. I look forward to 2023, and for all the new opportunities it brings to further our mission of #SolvingSeaLice and driving sustainability in aquaculture.
