Innovation Insights- June 7, 2024
Periodically I’ll share some of the latest developments in animal health including emerging startup companies, noteworthy innovations, trends, and impactful scientific publications. You’ll also get occasional book or podcast recommendations.
I value your input- if you have a newsworthy item or resource you think should be featured, please share it! Let’s keep our finger on the pulse of innovation in animal health together!
In the news
- $10 million prize launched for team that can truly talk to the animals
- This is a fascinating project aimed at using AI to decode animal vocabulary.
- Launched by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University, the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-way communication is offering a $10m equity investment or a $500,000 cash prize.
- Precedence for this kind of an application is found in publications like this interesting study about bat vocalizations: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39419
- If someone doesn’t come up with a company in this space named “The Cat’s Meow” I’ll be disappointed….. “The Donkey’s Bray”? “The Cow Goes Moo?”……
- Calviri announces completion of Groundbreaking Preventative Canine Cancer Vaccine Trial
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- Have you heard about Calviri? Calviri is a startup company in the oncology space, developing a novel preventative cancer vaccine as well as an early cancer detection diagnostic in both dogs and people.
- Calviri’s approach to preventing cancer is unique and worth watching. They’ve developed a preventative vaccine that generates an immune response against the common neoantigens that arise from RNA processing errors with the goal of priming the immune system to attack cancer as it develops.
- The VACCS clinical trial enrolled over 800 dogs who were examined every 6 months for tumors and received a vaccine booster ever year.
- The VACCS trial is now complete and moving into the data analysis phase. I can’t wait to see this data in a publication.
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- Artificial intelligence poised to transform veterinary care: AI experts gather at Cornell to discuss future developments relevant to the profession
- This is a nice overview of the recent Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Veterinary Medicine hosted by Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. I was there and thoroughly enjoyed the talks and networking opportunity.
- A few of the speakers who presented:
- Sebastian Gabor- Digitail, AI in Veterinary Medicine: The Next Paradigm Shift
- Geert De Meyer- Mars Petcare, It’s not about the AI, it’s about helping vets and pet owners!
- Sungwon Lim- Imprimed, Improving canine lymphoma treatment outcomes by individualizing drug selection using machine-learning-based predictive models
- Dr. Beatriz Martinez Lopez- UC Davis, Epidemiology and AI in veterinary medicine: state of the art and future challenges
- Javier Palarea-Albaladejo, Mirna Diagnostics, Predictive modelling for the rapid diagnosis of myxomatous mitral valve disease in dogs based on blood microRNA expression profiles
- Kathryn Morrison, McGill University, Automatic detection of Action Units (AU) in facial cats recognition and inference of grimace scale scores for pain level detection using deep learning
- Luke Dringoli, Media Cause, Purr-fectly Informed: Revolutionizing Feline Health Education with CatGPT
- The full program is found here
- There’s a nice list at the end of the article of AI and Tech-focused talks happening at the upcoming AVMA convention in Austin, TX June 21-25.
Scientific Publications
- Checkpoint Inhibitors in Dogs: Are We There Yet?
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- A nice review of checkpoint inhibitors and immunotherapy in dogs.
- Immunotherapy is an emerging area of interest in veterinary oncology, with the launch of checkpoint inhibitor gilvetmab by Merck in 2023 being the most recent therapeutic in this domain.
- The efficacy of caninized antibodies remains suboptimal, especially for canine oral melanoma.
- The authors emphasize a point that I strongly agree with: We need companion diagnostics for better patient selection when we use therapy like checkpoint inhibitors, as is standard in human oncology instead of broadly applying them to all cancers or even specific cancer types.
- Why is this paper important?
- As veterinary medicine continues to struggle to make progress in the development of effective cancer therapeutics, it’s important for us to learn from our mistakes and take a smarter approach to stratifying patients in order to pick the best candidates for a particular therapy.
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- Analysis of 3D pathology samples using weakly supervised AI
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- Can you imagine 3 dimensional histopath images? Most of us have looked at 2 dimensional microscope slides which serve as the standard of care for histopathology evaluation, but there are emerging imaging technologies that make 3D imaging a possibility for the future (more to come in a future dedicated newsletter!). I can’t wait for the day we are all looking at 3D histopath images.
- In this paper, the authors describe the complexity of manual evaluation of 3d images and have built TriPath, a deep learning platform for evaluating images and predicting clinical outcomes based on 3D morphological features
- Results:
- 3D volume-based prognostication achieved superior performance to traditional 2D slice-based approaches
- Why is this paper important?
- We are currently at an inflection point in pathology in which capabilities of digital slide scanning, artificial intelligence, and new imaging modalities are converging to result in fascinating opportunities for pathology as we know it to change radically. There is a real day coming soon in which we have slide free histology imaging in hospitals, 3d histology images to analyze, and AI models augmenting the pathologist. All of this means pathologists need to be ready for new and exciting changes to the way we work, and clinicians need to be educated about opportunities to get new and better data from their biopsy samples.
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- Cancer detection in dogs using rapid Raman molecular urinalysis
- This paper brings another technological approach to liquid biopsy cancer screening, Raman spectroscopy, using urine as the sample.
- Urine samples from 89 dogs with no history or evidence of cancer, 100 dogs with cancer, and 16 dogs with non-neoplastic urinary tract or renal disease.
- Check out the performance on this test. In this study, the sensitivity when detecting cancer patients versus healthy and those with urinary tract disease was 94%, but with a lower specificity at 90.5%. Performance was much better for lymphoma and osteosarcoma specifically at 100% sensitivity and specificity when compared to healthy patients.
- Why is this paper important?
- Liquid biopsy for cancer screening is still an important and hot topic in vet med, despite recent challenges in the market. This study introduces a technology that is fast, cheap, and has potential to be point of care. The performance is impressive, although with a lower specificity than some competitive technology. I’m anxious to see what a larger cohort and tweaks to the model could do to enhance performance.
Recommended Book
- The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets
- A new book from nobel prize winner Thomas R. Cech.
- I’m currently really enjoying this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in better understanding RNA and what it does. It’s an easy and accessible written, written in an engaging style not typical of this genre.
- A couple of good quotes:
“During the age of DNA, RNA was mostly overlooked by the general public. Certainly, textbooks described, and students learned, how RNA-the ribonucleic acid to DNA’s deoxyribonucleic acid-was copied from the double helix and how messenger RNA (mRNA) worked to transmit DNA’s code to instruct the synthesis of proteins. But RNA was never the star of the show. It was like a biochemical backup singer, slaving away in the shadow of the diva. “
“In fact, DNA has just one trick, albeit one that’s central to all life on earth. DNA stores genetic information. That’s it. It’s like the hieroglyphics in an Egyptian mummy’s tomb, or the grooves in a vinyl LP record, or the ones and zeros that make up the bits of information stored in a computer. DNA’s job is to sit there, in the cell nucleus, storing information. Reading out that information and doing something with it requires proteins- and RNA. The first thing to understand about RNA is that it is a many-splendored thing”.
*****Please note that I am not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this newsletter, nor do I receive any financial benefit from endorsing them. My interest is purely based on their innovative contributions to the industry.*****
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