About
Oluwatunde A. Aderounmu, DVM, MBA, PMP
A veterinarian and animal-health product developer whose work has centered on converting nutritional concepts into commercially manufactured poultry-feed products. He founded and directs NeuraNext Solutions LLC, an Arizona company formed in October 2024, where the active commercial-development focus is phytogenic poultry nutrition.
The career path runs from veterinary training through poultry and animal-health product work, prior phytogenic feed development and commercial manufacture, to the current feed formulation program at NeuraNext. The company has also explored early-stage neurotechnology concepts; that work remains exploratory and is not the current commercial focus.
Why this work, and who leads it
The difficulty is rarely the literature. It is the translational engineering: establishing inclusion rates that work in a complete feed, keeping volatile bioactive compounds intact through grinding, mixing, pelleting, moisture, and storage, holding palatability and feed quality, writing quality specifications that a mill can actually run to, and moving from a pilot batch to reproducible commercial production.
That is work I have completed before, at commercial scale, with two of the four compounds in the present formulation.
Prior product development and commercialization
From 2016 to 2022 I served first as Research Associate and then as Research and Product Development Manager at Hybrid Feeds Limited, where I led research and development for seven animal-nutrition products that reached commercial scale.
The most relevant of these was Hybrid Special 3-in-1, a phytogenic poultry-feed product formulated with garlic and ginger extracts. On that product I:
- determined maximum inclusion rates that did not degrade feed quality, palatability, or digestibility;
- identified which feed-manufacturing parameters degraded bioactivity and which preserved it;
- developed protective formulation and carrier approaches to maintain bioactivity through shelf-life;
- designed and implemented quality-control specifications for ingredient purity, compound standardization, finished-product verification, and safety testing;
- oversaw scale-up from laboratory and pilot batches to commercial production volumes on commercial feed-manufacturing equipment.
The product completed a three-month pilot-production phase before full commercial deployment and has remained in commercial distribution. This work received the company's Research Excellence Award (2018) and Innovation Award (2020).
Veterinary and avian-disease field experience
From 2015 to 2016 I served as a government Veterinary Officer with the Ministry of Animal Health in Sokoto State, Nigeria, conducting animal disease surveillance across commercial and backyard poultry operations, participating in avian-disease response activities including outbreak investigations and biosecurity assessments, and advising producers.
I was subsequently invited by the Nigerian Veterinary Medical Association to contribute to a state-level HPAI prevention and containment policy initiative, where my contribution concerned the producer-education and compliance components — how prevention measures can be communicated to and actually adopted by producers of varying scale and technical capacity. That is the same translational problem we are taking on at the level of the feed itself.
U.S. animal-health industry experience
I currently work in the U.S. animal-health industry in a commercial operations and pricing capacity, covering pricing, customer operations, and e-commerce channel implementation for animal-health products distributed through large U.S. veterinary networks. This provides current operational knowledge of how regulated animal-health products are positioned, supported, and moved through commercial channels.
An independent company
NeuraNext is independently originated and directed, and falls outside my employer's product portfolio by product category, regulatory pathway, and channel. The feed program is a nutritional product developed for feed manufacturers, poultry nutritionists, and production integrators, not a pharmaceutical or biologic distributed through veterinary clinics.
Education and credentials
| Credential | Institution |
|---|---|
| Master of Business Administration | W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University (2024) |
| Doctor of Veterinary Medicine | Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria (2014) |
| Project Management Professional (PMP) | Project Management Institute |
Veterinary training included veterinary immunology, veterinary pathology, special and avian pathology, veterinary virology, avian medicine, and feeds and feeding. Graduate business training was oriented toward product management and innovation, market analysis, operations, and commercialization of early-stage products in regulated industries.
Scientific review and earlier academic publications
I have authored or coauthored three peer-reviewed papers. They are veterinary-anatomy and neuroanatomy studies — astrocyte morphology in the African giant rat, and spinal-cord anatomy of the greater cane rat — not publications on avian influenza, phytogenic antivirals, or poultry-feed formulation. They are listed here as background of scientific training, not as evidence that the feed program's biological objectives have been published or established.
- Olude, M.A., Mustapha, O.A., Aderounmu, O.A., Olopade, J.O., & Ihunwo, A.O. (2015). Astrocyte morphology, heterogeneity, and density in the developing African giant rat (Cricetomys gambianus). Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 9.
- Mustapha, O.A., Aderounmu, O.A., Olude, M.A., Okandeji, M.E., Akinloye, A.K., Oke, B.O., & Olopade, J.O. (2015). Anatomical studies on the spinal cord of the greater cane rat (Thryonomys swinderianus, Temminck) I: Gross morphometry. Nigerian Veterinary Journal 36:1192–1202.
- Mustapha, O.A., Taiwo, S., Olude, A.M., Aderounmu, O.A., Okandeji, M.E., Akinloye, A.K., Olopade, J.O., & Oke, B.O. (2017). Anatomical studies on the spinal cord of the greater cane rat (Thryonomys swinderianus, Temminck) II: Histomorphology and spinal tracings. Nigerian Veterinary Journal 38:129–139.
- Peer reviewer, Journal of Emerging Investigators (not HPAI or poultry-nutrition manuscripts).
- Scientific judge, Arizona Science and Engineering Fair.
Contact
Technical and collaboration enquiries are welcome through Work with us, or directly to research@neuranextsolutions.com.