I recently attended my first Animal Health Nutrition Technology Innovation event in Boston, hosted by Kisaco Research. I can say that I came home physically exhausted but emotionally energized.
Kisaco describes the program as “connecting discovery, development, and delivery to accelerate how innovation moves from idea to impact.” In practice, that meant a room of founders, strategic partners, investors, practice leaders, service providers, and a few academics, all looking at how animal health innovation is built, funded, and brought to the people who use it.
The little we know
I picked up new vocabulary, including “data room,” a term I learned in a session on investment and acquisitions, but the bigger lesson was how little most of us in practice know about what makes animal health work.
Look around your clinic. How did your PIMS get created? That vaccine? That diagnostic? That AI tool? Who was behind it, and what hurdles did they clear to get it into your hands? A friend and colleague at the event put it well: Veterinary professionals “don’t know what they are missing.” He was talking about the value of getting more practice-based professionals into these rooms. I agree, and I hope to see more there next year.
Longevity, Healthspan, and the Problem of Definitions
The strongest theme was longevity and healthspan. Dr. Linda Rhodes interviewed Celine Halioua, founder of Loyal, who is working toward a longevity drug for dogs. Halioua described how big and emotional the response has been around her vision, and how easily pet owners want to take part once they hear the goal. It’s a vivid reminder of how deeply people love their dogs.
When asked whether the real target is longevity or healthspan, Halioua explained that improving healthspan should produce longevity as a result. What Loyal’s product will ultimately look like is still under wraps. That leaves some confusion, but also an intrigue we can’t ignore. Loyal’s marketing and fundraising success is impressive. We’ll have to wait and see whether they can prove the science, capture the data, and complete the FDA’s required process.
Abhay Nayak, president of Zoetis, also spoke on healthspan. He cited a reporter’s line: “There’s never been a better time to be a pet.” He shared that pet lifespans have grown from about 9 years to 13 since the 1980s, roughly a 50% improvement, and cats have gained an average of 1.7 additional years. But those gains come with a cost: a heavier burden of chronic disease in aging pets.
Nayak noted that human medicine is finding new ways to express aging, like the “Whoop age” from wearable data. That got me thinking: could we one day have a “Woof age” for dogs? Pets are at the center, he said, but engaged owners are the key drivers of preventive care. The human-animal bond keeps growing, yet owners are working with three budgets: financial, time, and compassion.
Here are the thoughts I keep returning to. “Healthspan” sounds a lot like “quality of life,” a term we’ve used for a long time, but I think it’s more than that. From what I’m hearing, healthspan is the measurable ability to maintain an excellent health status, but this requires that we have a better consensus on its definition and ways to measure it. As science and technology advance, we may have better and more proactive ways to measure animal health, but without definitions and metrics, longevity and healthspan will be just buzzwords. What is the real goal, and how will we know we’re making progress?
Access to Care, Reimagined
Access to care came up repeatedly, including through a very different practice model. Veterinarians and co-founders Brendon Laing and Emma Harris built Novel, a Canadian practice that was already profitable after 18 months, with fees 10 to 40% below local competitors. Some key features:
- A membership model with unlimited exams
- A 6:1 support-to-veterinarian ratio
- 90% of client-facing communication handled by Veterinary nurses
- Medical staff who all have at least 10 years of experience
- A high-volume practice open 365 days a year, 8:00 am to 8:00 pm
- Extensive use of technology, AI, and automation
You don’t have to copy the model to learn from it. It challenges assumptions about staffing, pricing, and what clients can expect. There’s room for multiple practice models, but it is important to know what type of business models best serve which pets, clients, and Veterinary professionals so each can thrive.
AI: From Efficiency to Evidence
AI was everywhere, as expected, but there was genuine conversation on how the tool could improve our ability to help animals. AI in animal health is moving in waves, from efficiency and data capture, to predictive and proactive platforms, to personalized medicine and broader transformation. The key hurdles are data governance, algorithmic bias, and change management.
Dottie Brown, VP for Science and Healthcare Innovation at Mars Veterinary Health, described using AI to speed up surveys by analyzing large-scale, anonymous, real-world owner conversations. That reveals what owners notice, what worries them, and the language they use.
The larger point was about outcomes. Better health outcome data should help us answer the questions that matter. Does the drug actually make the animal better? Does earlier detection actually change outcomes? Does more data from digital health tools actually lead to better results?
Major companies in animal health are investing in AI, and outside investors have their eye on the industry as well. The prediction is that massive amounts of value (in the billions of dollars) will be unlocked from the investment in AI.
Everyone Wins
One final theme was the only one that I heard some people question in quiet conversation. If you’ve lived life long enough, I can understand where you can get a little jaded and skeptical of people making decisions where everyone could win. However, I’ll join the conference organizers in being bullish on this, and all the more that I need your help.
Progress takes many roles, companies, and perspectives: veterinarians, founders, investors, researchers, and service providers. To get the most out of that diversity, we need the mindset of working together, staying curious, and creating a bigger pie that can lead to taking care of the animals we have all come together for in the first place. That’s hard in a competitive industry, but it’s worth having the conversation and constantly striving for.
If you’ve never attended an event like this, I encourage you to consider it. If you’ve been invited to be an advisor, give your feedback on a product, or otherwise participate in the creation of animal health resources, consider it. And when you do, go in curious. Ask genuine questions seeking to understand more context. The tools in your practice have stories behind them, and understanding those stories makes us better stewards of what comes next.