Pet owners are willing to make big sacrifices for their pets. A recent study of 2,000 Americans found that 63% would give up years of their own lives to extend their pet’s lifespan. And when asked what they would give up to add one more year to their pet’s life, 67% would forgo alcohol for a year, 50% would sacrifice three years of vacation and 48% would even give up $10k.
But what if it didn’t have to be me or the dog?
From nutrition to life-extending drugs, scientists and startups are working on adding some extra time to the lives of our furry friends, opening up a new market of information and products. In this month’s episode of The oppawtunity, we sat down with some of the people and companies at the front of these innovations.
For some hints on when we could first see the sale of a life extending drug for dogs listen to the whole episode — or read some lightly edited highlights below.
For decades, scientists have studied how nutrition can play a key role in extending the lives of dogs and cats. Pascal Steiner is senior director nutrition science at the Purina, one of the most prominent researchers in the space and sponsor of the podcast, and says the key is determining the dog's biological, not chronological, age.
Steiner: Historically, we treated age as the number of calendar years that someone has lived, which is called chronological age. But it's really more complex than that. I'm sure that everyone has met pets or people who seem older than their years. This is the basis for biological age. Biological age indicates how well we are aging.
Using data collected from various studies over the last 12 years, Purina scientists developed an algorithm which can now quantify whether a pet is younger or older than it should be relative to their chronological age. Philip Gut is expert biology of aging at Purina and says there's a big paradigm shift in how we look at aging because of the ability to use big data like this.
Gut: We used data records that are in essence nothing else than what any veterinary practice or veterinary research site can produce. It's data from routine blood exams that individually tell you something about the health of different body systems — metabolic health, the kidney health, the heart health of the pet.
It's really a breakthrough in terms of technology.
But what we can do with the algorithm that we created, we can make a holistic score out of these individual markers that quantify biological age as a readout on how well the pet is aging. There is a possibility to use it as a tool that helps us to determine our aging trajectory or the aging trajectory of the pet. And this is very important because for a long time, it was thought that genetics are a big determinant of how we age, but genetics are really only a very limited factor in how we age. The most impact comes from our choices at a daily level — what we eat, how much we exercise and so on. So it's really a breakthrough in terms of technology.
Separately to Purina, an ongoing long-term study of dogs is being conducted, centered at the University of Washington. Dubbed the Dog Aging Project, the project focuses on research to understand dog aging through citizen science and the collection of big data. Matt Kieberlein is co-director of the Dog Aging Project and says important information has already been found.
Kieberlein: A lot of what's been done to date are correlative studies. For example, one of the pieces of information we get from every owner is their zip code. So we know something about water quality. We know something about air quality. We can ask, are there any correlations between certain things in the water and specific disease diagnoses?
We can also ask questions around diet. Are there relationships to how often the dogs are eating, what they're eating and specific age-related disease diagnoses? We can also ask questions around cognitive function. Same type of idea. What factors are associated with better or worse cognitive function in dogs? That's an interesting example where the most associated factor with cognitive function is age. That's exactly what we would expect. I would have been worried if age wasn't the greatest risk factor. For dementia in dogs, it is just like it is in people. But once you get beyond age, other factors turn out to be strongly correlated with cognitive function, like sterilisation status. Has the dog been sterilised or not? Or exercise. Exercise and sterilisation, I think, were number two and number three on the list of factors that were associated with risk of dementia in dogs. So you can start to identify those types of really interesting correlations.
But the study isn't just about dogs. It's about us too. Although dogs age more rapidly, there are a lot of reasons why we should study them to provide insights into human health.
Kieberlein: There are actually a lot of reasons. One obvious one is dogs age about seven to ten times faster than people do from a biological perspective. Chronological time is the same in humans and dogs, but everybody is sort of familiar with the idea that one human year is seven dog years. That just means dogs age biologically about seven times faster than people. That's really important, because that means we can study that biological aging process and the factors that influence it, and carry out clinical trials to test whether or not interventions can slow biological aging. We can do that in a reasonable timeframe.
Dogs age biologically about seven times faster than people. That's really important, because that means we can study that biological aging process and the factors that influence it.
Also, dogs age biologically very much like people do. So most of what we learn about aging in dogs will be relevant for humans. I think that's obviously another important piece if your concern is human health and longevity. That's one of my concerns. But people love their dogs. The statistics tell us that upwards of 60% of pet owners in the US consider their companion animal to be part of their family. And if we can successfully slow aging, improve healthspan, improve lifespan in people's family members, that's really important.
The last thing that I'll point to as one of the major factors that differentiates what we can learn from the Dog Aging Project from the vast majority of research that has happened in this field previously is that dogs share the human environment. They live in the real world. With the exception of observational studies in humans, nearly all of the studies in this field up until this point have been in laboratory animals. They're usually genetically inbred animals living in a very, very controlled environment.
In the laboratory, in fact, we try to control the environment as much as we possibly can in order to shrink the noise as much as we can to detect differences in experimental conditions. But of course humans live in this really complicated environment that's changing dynamically by the hour, by the minute, by the second. And dogs share nearly every aspect of that environment, with the exception, in most cases, of diet. That's the one place where the environment is a little bit different. Most dogs don't eat the same diet that their owners eat. But in pretty much every other way, dogs share our environment, and it is as complicated and dynamic as the human environment.
Startups are already interested in this research — especially a clinical trial into whether a drug can improve the health lifespan of dogs.
Kieberlein: It is double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled study to test whether or not the drug Rapamycin can increase lifespan and improve health span in companion dogs. This is really, I think, a place where companion dogs shine, because you can't do that sort of clinical trial in people, at least not for lifespan, as the end point because it would take you 30 years to do that study in humans. So I think answering that question in dogs, especially if the result turns out to be that Rapamycin seems to slow aging, increase lifespan and improve health span in companion dogs, will be immensely important for them, but also I think will give much more confidence that this is very likely to work the same way in humans, living in this complex, dynamic environment.
And related to that, one of the things that is most pleasing for me to see is that our efforts to show that we could do this with Rapamycin have now led to biotech companies moving into this space, working on novel drug development to move forward through the FDA approval process for companion animals.
Celine Haluet is founder and CEO of Loyal, the San Francisco-based biotech, which was founded in 2020 and secured $33.5m in Series B funding last July.
Haluet: Loyal is a medium-stage company with about 60 people and all-day, every day is working on getting a drug FDA approved for healthy lifespan extension of dogs.
Big dogs have a very tragic life. They live much shorter lives so a big dog could live — half the lifespan of what you'd expect something like a Chihuahua to live.
Loyal is making and testing drugs for both large dogs and senior dogs. Our products fall into two categories. So either for large dog lifespan extension or for senior dogs of most sizes' life extension. So we started with large dog lifespan extension, which is LOY-001 and LOY-003 because one, I'm a big dog person. I have a sleeping rottie in the corner of my living room right now, but also because big dogs have a very tragic life. They live much shorter lives so a big dog could live — half the lifespan of what you'd expect something like a Chihuahua to live — and the initial thesis of the company five years ago, a thesis that's proven out to be at least directionally correct, is that the short lifespan of big dogs is not natural. It's actually an unintended consequence of historical inbreeding for size.
But of course not everybody's a big dog person. And you can take a lot about what you learn from big dogs to take it into smaller dogs too. Big dogs basically are an accelerated version of what happens in every dog. And so LOY-002 is being developed for senior dogs or older dogs of most sizes, just targeting the generalised aging process.
At the end of 2023, Loyal earned what it believed to be the FDA's first ever formal acceptance that a drug can be developed and approved to extend lifespan for LOY-001.
Haluet: So we are going through the FDA process for all of our drugs. And that was very important because there's a lot of supplements. There's a lot of everything that claims to extend your dog's lifespan. And we wanted to be able to definitively prove that, yes, if your veterinarian prescribes this, you can hopefully expect a benefit to your dog. And that's really important.
And so one of the big challenges of doing that is that there's never actually been a drug FDA approved for lifespan extension. Of course, a lot of drugs are implicitly for lifespan extension or lifespan extension in the context of a disease state. But we wanted to get a drug FDA approved for a relatively healthy animal that doesn't really have any existing diagnoses besides being a certain age and a certain risk criteria to keep them healthier longer.
Could we carve out a path in a way that figures out the science and a regulatory path that brings the science to dog owners?
That was honestly the big bet of the company. Could we carve out a path in a way that figures out the science and a regulatory path that brings the science to dog owners?
Listen to the full episode — and subscribe to the series — here.
This podcast is sponsored by Unleashed by Purina. It is hosted and produced by Steph Bailey, edited by Billy Craigon and managed by Tanya Maheshwari.