It’s a case of new look, new life for semen separator Memphasys, which has slashed its losses after drawing a line under years of legal disputes.

Chairperson Alison Coutts says, all going well, they are a little over a year away from commercialising a sperm separator for men.

Memphasys (ASX:MEM) is developing a membrane that separates quick swimmers from the flabby floaters to improve IVF procedures.

The tech, ‘named Felix’, isn’t commercialised yet so there’s no revenue.

But the resolution of all former litigation issues cut losses by 80 per cent to $401,000.

Liabilities fell from $6.6 million to $823,000, while cash holdings went from $2000 at the start of the year to $200,000.

Ms Coutts told Stockhead earlier this year the current board had inherited a range of troubles and an ASIC investigation from Memphasys’ previous life, all of which had now been sorted.

“We’ve got a free run now, there’s no black cloud behind us anymore,” Ms Coutts said on Friday.

Fixing male fertility

Memphasys is designing and building the next generation Felix device for men which (ironically) will take up to nine months.

They says testing by IVF clinics will take about six months after that and they hope to be ready for launch by the end of calendar 2019 in Europe.

Ms Coutts expects deals to be signed by a few leading centres in Europe in the September quarter and “hot on the heels of that” are likely to be some American ones.

She say everyone they approached in Europe were “delighted to participate” in testing because a device to separate the good sperm from the bad doesn’t appear to exist.

Horsing around

The company is now developing cartridges which can process the sperm for both human and horse use.

The horse division, which attracted a $1 million investment from Perth’s biggest horse breeder this year, is further ahead.

University of Newcastle researchers found that the re-usable cartridge was able to process fresh horse semen and harvest the best of it.

Ms Coutts says they could launch a horse product now if they wanted to do specialised IVF treatments for horses (known as ICSI) not much sperm is needed for that and the Newcastle researchers had proved the device worked with small volumes.

But for artificial insemination you need considerably more.

“Memphasys plans to develop a new, purpose-designed and built device for equine ART processes, including IVF technologies and artificial insemination. The equine device will need to process a much larger semen volume (10 to 100 fold greater) than the human IVF device,” the company said.

Unfortunately, artificial reproductive technologies (ART) are not legally allowed to be used on thoroughbred horses but can be on any other horse types.

Memphasys is targeting show horses, Arabs, polo ponies and horses used for the trots.

That new device is still very much under wraps.

Memphasys shares were flat at 1.5c on Friday.

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