Hello everyone, very excited to have you on another one of our lunch and learns which this week is being sponsored by Nationwide Labs. We're going to be talking about a really interesting topic. I remember seeing a paper from one of my old orthopaedic lecturers, probably from the 1990s talking about a Great Dane that had been spayed had been castrated very early and had then subsequently broken a bone.
So it was clear that sort of just neutering all at the same time at 6 months or whatever the time was, was not appropriate, and I think it's still the same today, so we're gonna be talking about neutering is no longer one size fits all. Thank you so much for Nationwide for making this possible. This is a sponsored webinar free of charge for all of our vets and nurses to watch.
We have 3 speakers today, very eminent speakers. We have Doctor Ollie Gehrig, who is a seasoned veterinarian with years of experience in sales and marketing within the animal health industry. He's the CEO and founder of Vaheri, and he's the chairman of the board of In Citizen.
And Professor Alison Heather is the professor of physiology at the University of Otago in New Zealand and he's also the chief scientific Officer at In Citizen. She's a professor with over 24 years of research on the physiology of steroid hormones and their role in health and disease, and she's internationally recognised for her development of bioassays for the detection of steroid hormones. She's got 75 publications and has groundworking research, and this work has really significantly advanced the understanding of steroid hormones in health and disease.
And finally, Helen Evans from Nationwide will also be presenting and I remember Helen from a long time ago from reports I was sending through for steroid assays, and Helen is the veterinary services operations manager. So really looking forward to this webinar, it's something that impacts vets and nurses pretty much every day of the week of the working week. So really excited to hear your thoughts and er findings in the work that you've all been doing, so it's over to you.
Thank you, Anthony, and thanks Rebecca for your kind introduction. And today we speak about neutering is no longer one size fits all. I'm really happy and proud to have joined the company a couple of years ago as a member of the board because I think, and as a vet, I think I already got the feedback from the industry as this product can really change the life for millions of dogs globally.
And just to say it in the beginning, this is like not a political statement about being pro or contra neutering. This is just possibility to add data around the decision and one of our advisors is Professor Doctor Sandra Gurriepesh, and she's a professor at the University of Hanover and. As you can read, she said as a specialist in veterinary reproduction, she strongly supports our platform because for too long neutering decisions have been made and especially also been overlooking hormonal maturity as the key factor in long-term health.
So detecting hormonal maturity before neutering. Allows us a more personalised decision, an informed decision, and it reduces risks like behavioural problems and long-term health impacts such as certain orthopaedic problems, and at the very least it should be part of the conversation with the owner. So you have a tool now and we say please use it.
So Sex hormones, which are androgens in males and estrogens in females, progesterones in females, they matter, so they don't just, dictate the reproduction system, but they also impact the brain, the cardiovascular system, the immune system, as well as kidney production of erythropoietin. And also has a strong effect on muscle mass, bone strength, and joint structure and and ligament structure. And so, if we take away the hormone, those sex hormones too early, that can lead to a lifetime of health issues.
We're basically changing the physiology of the dogs for their entire adult life. Yet despite knowing this, over 100 million dogs are neutered or spayed without being assessed for maturity, and data from Benjamin Hart's laboratory in the USA really highlight how it's basically a toying cost if you neuter your dog too early and the damage that it's going to cause in adult life. So shown here is the data for orthopaedic risk.
And if you neuter your dog before 6 months, you basically, impose an 8-fold higher risk that that dog's gonna have orthopaedic injury. If you neuter it after 12 months, then that risk lowers to about 0.5 times.
So we're basically, a 16 times difference, less than 6 months, greater than 12 months. But then look at in between, so 6 to 11 months, you're basically, See half the risk, we go from 8 times down to 3.5 times.
Now why is this? That's because half those dogs will have gone through hormonal maturity when they get neutered, and half of them haven't. And so, basically it's a toying cost at the moment, if you are neutered between 6 and 11 months, whether the dog is going to be harmed or or not harmed, and because of this risk based on age alone, is that a risk worth taking?
So when to neuter then has become a hot topic, and again like this data that's coming from UC Davies's research shows that it's not just scientists like myself that are talking about this, but it's going out to, to the wider, wider world, where 23 media outlets like, New York Times, The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, they've all published articles on the topic. But if you take a scientist like me, This Frontier publication has been downloaded 2.2 million times at the time when I downloaded it, and it has an alt metric impact score of 343, and as a scientist, we get excited if we have an alt metric score of 20.
So that just puts into context how high this impact factor is, so it's reaching not just veterinarians, but the, the wider scientific world and the wider popular world, population world. So, we know that when to neuter has become a hot topic, but at the moment, veterinarians lack the tools to be able to say, has the dog gone through hormonal maturity? And given that the tools aren't available, then they're not able to offer a concrete scientific evidence that the dog has, gone through this maturity, threshold.
Yeah, and build on that amazing deep tech technology that Alison invented. This is our first product. It's neutral ready.
It changes everything around the decision of neutering later also around spaying. And the nice thing is, as we already said, we're not political. We just give you a data point and very important data point.
So this is the next step of the guidelines on an individual level. To get back the power to own your dog's health, to have clarity when it is the right time, and also to gain confidence in your choice, which then in the long term makes you much happier together with your dog, with your patient, as you know, you have taken that decision at the right time. So, knowing that sexual hormone maturity matters, why can we not measure it already?
So we at the moment, we can measure hormones, and we measure those hormones based on function, not on their structure. And so we have testosterone, we have estradiol, and these are small, what we call small molecules, and the way that they're measured at the moment is you've, ah, there's an antibody that looks for testosterone, and when it finds testosterone, it, you can, you can detect it through Eliza and these kind of chemical tests. But the problem is that these are small molecules, and their structure, if you just look at the structure of testosterone here, it's a four-ringed structure.
But esradiol is also a four-ringed structure, glucocorticoid also a four ring structure, and progesterone, and so there's a lot of overlap between the structures. And so finding an antibody that can differentiate between all of these very similar looking steroid hormones is very difficult at the low levels that we need to detect, if you want to detect between immaturity and maturity. And so when we took 110, Dog samples that were sent to us from the USA vet clinics, they were sent to the New Zealand laboratory, and we tested those, adult, dog samples and the puppy samples using a, an Elizer system, and the Eliza system we used was the R&D system that they use in the anti-doping labs, so why did we use the one that they use in anti-doping labs?
Because it's highly sensitive, it's the most sensitive one out there. And it's been accredited for their anti-doping. They, they, they, they build legal cases around this, so it has to be accurate.
But in this case, it wasn't accurate enough at the low levels that we need to differentiate between puppies and adults. But when we used the tests that in situ gen's technology is based on, the Nittaredi test, What we were able to show was a clear difference between those puppy samples and the adult samples, and this is because we base our essay on hormone receptor activation, and then that, downstream activity of that hormone receptor. And why does this work better?
Because over evolution, The steroid receptors for androgens have evolved to be highly specific for the androgens, so for testosterone, whereas the oestrogen receptor has evolved to be highly specific for estradiol, and so then there's no crossover, and so we're able to use this highly Sensitive receptor to trap the, testosterone that's in the sample, and then do, do what the hormone receptor normally does in our cells to produce a response that we're able to measure, and that measurement then clearly defines between a puppy and an adult. So our test is highly accurate. It's able to differentiate between puppies and adults, defining hormonal maturity.
It's simple to use, it takes, the actual test itself takes 1 hour, using standard laboratory equipment, and it's at an approachable price point, and it's accessible, at the moment it's, a laboratory test, but we're making a solution, which Ollie will talk about later, where that will work anywhere and everywhere, so even, the vets in their vet clinics could, eventually do some of this testing. It's highly innovative. I have 19 patents have been granted so far across many jurisdictions.
We have 4 patent families covering the different, different products that we're offering, through, through the in-situgen platform. Super. And now we come into clinical cases.
Like for me as a veterinarian, this excites me the most, and these were the first cases that arrived at our lab, at our home lab in New Zealand, and we, we see that guidelines are super good and they cover maybe 90%, but they are not covering on an individual basis. And the first patient that we received. A 9 month old male Czech Russell terrier, so suitable for surgical sterilisation accordingly to the UC Davis guidelines.
They claim that you can do it with around 6 months, and our neuter ready test showed that this Jack Russell is still a puppy, so super good for the owner. So we decided it's too early for gonodectomy. And the vet recommended a recheck after 3 months, and 3 months later, the dog already had an increase in the hormones, so he was not a puppy anymore, and I will come back to this Czech Russell terrier later.
Second, we have the 10 month old male German Shepherd. And UC Davis guidelines has an age of 24 months for male German shepherds, so this one was unsuitable for surgical sterilisation, but neuter ready results showed already very high hormone levels. So this dog already been out of the puppy state and already went into puberty and into maturity, and then.
The last case that was the only case of the 1st 3 that stick to the guidelines because he was 13 months of age, he was a Swiss Shepherd, and as Thomas always said, our colleague in the board, the Swiss always stick to the guidelines, so this one sticks to the guidelines. And he showed that he was still a puppy, so too early for a gonadectomy, and yeah, recheck after 3 months. For this dog, there was a very high pressure to to sterilise the dog because of daycare and therefore we or the vet together with us recommended let's check again in 3 months and to find like kind of the earliest spot where we can do it, but.
Interestingly, you can also see like new to Radio already made a lot of noise in the scientific and the veterinary community, so there are super many vets around the world that that commented on the product that commented on the problem, and we are super happy that we have such a big support out of the veterinary community. So coming back to George, I always mix up Czech with George, but it's George and he's a Czech Russell. That's why I'm sometimes getting confused with this one.
The nice thing in this case was the owner works in the veterinary industry and he was super happy. That he knew about the time frame that allowed him to make that decision so he still can be a puppy and then after he went out of the puppy stage to decide in this case for chemical castration, and that's also a nice part of it, the essay is amazingly good to also monitor chemical castration success. So this owner and his family, they highly recommend taking this test as this opens up real options based on new data and on individual level.
Now I hand over to to Helen. OK, very, very simple test to carry out. The vet obviously decides whether they want to go ahead, and they're just, it's basically just a simple 2 mil blood sample using plain tubes or gel tubes.
You can also use heparin tubes, but it's very important DDDA plasma must not be used because this will interfere with the, test system. But that isn't used very frequently anyway, so it's probably not going to be an issue. Ideally separate the sample, but I think it can probably come through as spun gel tubes.
Alison can probably confirm that, but I think that should be OK. We get a lot of samples which are gel tubes which have been spun by the practise but not actually separated and that should still be fine. Just send your sample through to NWL in the normal way.
If you have a courier service or a lockbox, it can go up to our headquarters lab in Blackpool. They will then send the samples down to us here at the specialist lab because that's where the test will be done, or you can send it direct here. There is an email address to get information, or phone up if you've got any queries about, transportation.
Request forms can be, our normal request forms can be downloaded from the NWR website, but we also accept samples on headed notepaper as long as all the details are there, what animal's name, owner's name, etc. And vet practise. Then we'll do the test.
We would aim to turn the test around within 7 working days, and we would send results out by email, which would include a quantitative androgen activity with maturity guidance for easy interpretation. Thank you, Helen. And now some words about our Neutral Ready launch in the UK about where to find additional information.
So first of all, as, as Helen already explained, the lab procedure and the sample procedure, Neutral Ready is available in the UK now for around 70 pounds per test. If you want more information around this test, you can visit the NW Lab's web page. Slash neuterready we have a page dedicated for veterinarians globally neuterready.vet and if your pet owners, if your patient owners want to gain more information about the benefit of this essay, they can go to neuterready.com.
As you can see on the right side we showed some screenshots. You see Helen now as a duplicate, so she's here in that call and also on the slide and. You can get all the information from NW Labs, but as well as from both, from both web pages, one for the owners and one for veterinarians.
Thank you very much for this, this, introduction around marketing and I will say a little bit about the product pipeline that we're building, so Neutral Ready is just the start. It's launched by NW Labs now, but this is an androgen kit, so we have also female dogs, so we will complement with an oestrogen kit. And we call this oestrogen kit Spay ready, and the nice thing, and this is also based on the work Alison and Helen explored together, we can also use this test to detect ovarian remnant syndrome called spay check.
On the long term, we are heading towards a longevity annual product because as Alison already explained, we are measuring the functional. The functional activity of the hormones, so we can do much more than to detect like a level of endogenous hormones in the blood, so we can also measure exogenous effects on your body and therefore we Aim to go towards longevity and yield. All the products that we see here, as Alison already explained, they are reference lab products, but our pipeline is built also in parallel towards an easy to use kit for your in-clinic service.
So thank you from the team of NW Labs, thank you from the team of In Zogen, and thanks to the webinar that. And now we're, I think entering into the option to ask questions. Fantastic.
Thanks Ollie, thanks Alison, thanks Helen. I just as people are sort of thinking about some questions, I just er. Was wondering if people would put in where they're listening from, so we've got a lot of people on the webinar, so it'll be interesting to know where they're listening from cos where is the test available, Ollie, is it just in the UK or is it all over?
If you can just let us know where people can actually get hold of it from. It's a good question, so as the technology comes originally from New Zealand, this is the first market that ever introduced the essay. Where we already sample other products and other verticals for years now and so the first, the first location was New Zealand.
Now we have launched it in the UK and then most likely we will see will be another large, large market in in Europe and then going towards the US, which is then for from a neuter discussion like the biggest market and where this topic is kind of the. The, the hottest I would say yes, hm. So Penny is listening in from Washington, Danielle from Ireland.
Rachel from UK, Hannah from UK, Lydia from Australia. Sarah from Chicago, Chris from UK er Sylvia from the Finger Lakes region of New York State, up near Cornell, I visited a number of years ago, Sylvia, beautiful place where you're living. Er so yeah, lots of er different places where people are listening from, from Bergamo in Italy as well, Texas, United States, Scotland, Mariana in Spain, Portugal.
So coming from all over as well, let me see anywhere else, North Wales, Stefania, er from Belgium. From Oxford, Singapore, so thank you so much oh Trinidad and Tobago, that's fantastic. Er so we've got some questions, let me go through those, if you can, I noticed people were putting them in the chat box, if you can put them in the question box, it just makes my life a bit easier, I'm not very good at this multitasking malarkey, so if you can do that, that would be helpful for me.
Somebody's just said, I know this is really beyond the scope of this talk, but behavioural implications, fear, aggression, are there situations in this realm where you might recommend not to neuter at all, ever? So, so, you know, the old advice was you neuter cos it will help calm the dog down or castrate the dog cos it will help calm it down, but obviously if you've got a really nervous dog, I think there's quite a lot of evidence that suggests that it's, it's not gonna help at all, it might hinder. Have you got any sort of ideas with that, you know, using it, not only for orthopaedic reasons but also for, more behavioural reasons as well, maybe one for Alison first.
It's probably better coming from Ollie being a vet, it's what I said in the beginning and we spoke about it a lot with, with Professor Sandra Gerry Capesh and per se she's not a big fan of neutering and this is the dynamics we see, but then we have Other arguments we have overpopulation. Dogs have to go to daycare, and I think. We're not becoming political and we're not reproduction experts to give advice on that on that behaviour topic on an individual dog.
We just have a tool and then it's up to you and to discuss it with your behaviour experts, with your reproduction experts, if this is an option, and then you can still go towards chemical castration first, can see how the dog reacts. That's what I did with my with my dog, I can see if it, if it helps. So chemical castration is definitely like kind of very good tool to trial it in that individual.
But by far I'm not a reproduction specialist like Sun dry, so we discussed this a lot. We give, we give you a, we give you an essay around this discussion to monitor this, this topic, but I think it would be, it would be unfair if I would give an advice from my perspective. Yeah, I suppose in a sense.
You're not saying to castrate or not to castrate, you're saying get more information before you make the decision. Exactly, and especially like I always say to, to the vets, how can you prove that the dog is not a puppy anymore? And, and the samples that we received showed that many dogs are still puppies.
They are babies, so you should not do it. This is. 100% clear or let's say 99% clear that you should not do it when there's still a puppy, so there is enough evidence around it and, and that was really interesting with the Jack Russell, I think it was George, .
You know, In past times when I was being asked, I would have said a small dog like a Jack Russell, more likely to be mature by 6 to 10 months, obviously a German Shepherd later, Great Dane later, but you know, you showed with that data that the dog was, you know, still not ready to be spayed, I think it was at 10 months or whatever the number was, so, it's adding an extra, just a layer in there for you to think about, I think Sarah comes up with a good, Point, you know, kind of from the opposite side if you like, if we don't spay and neuter prematurity pets, when we have them in shelters and rescues, we're going to end up with worsening overpopulation problems, animals that won't get adopted and limited resources like fosters being overwhelmed. So I, you know, I can understand that side as well, I suppose. We're always there trying to put animal welfare first, but it's, this is where er, there are obviously grey areas, so I absolutely get that, let me see, any other questions, .
So I know we were just talking about the castration test. Have you got any information with the spay test on how is the test related to the first heat, . And Vera said I always used to neuter always after the first heat and not earlier, but some people would neuter before heat.
I know Peter Holt used to show that there was more chance of dogs being er having incontinence if they were spayed before a first heat. Have you got any sort of data on the spaying situation yet or are we still waiting for more information from that side? We, we discussed it a lot, especially like with Professor Sandra Gri Capesh, and I think it's absolutely what she said as well, like you, you have kind of to do it before 2 years of age and after the first heats, but then there are a couple of things sometimes you can't see the heat, so the dog is already going towards 2 years, you never saw it.
So it gives you another data point that the dog is getting into or is already mature from the oestrogen level and. It's, it's, yeah, I mean, if you, if you, we spoke a lot about the oestrogen topic and many times it was, it where the vet, the vets that popped it up and said for for, for the female dogs we see it even more complex and we would love to have a tool, . I had a, I had a male dog, and, and for me it was, I, I clearly like saw myself in that situation with that male dog, and as you said, like my dog always escaped when the female dogs were in the heat and he killed himself kind of twice.
So, and, and, and we also speak like with vets, for example, like in in in Singapore we spoke with with veterinarians. They say we have to do it between 6 and 12 weeks because the dogs have to go to daycare, the people are working. So yeah, there will be various examples in that world where you have to take the decision and where we give you a data point that is highly valuable.
Heather, er, Alison Yep, so, exactly what Ollie said, and, and to add to that, you know, when I've been talking to vets about when they spay, they like to do it when the dogs and actually had gone through the first heat and then gone into anestros, so the oestrogen levels and the progesterone levels are low, because and then there's less vascular vascularisation risk, and so this is one way you can use the test after the first heat. And then show that the levels have fallen, and then it's safe to, it's safer to do the operation at that point. Yeah, thank you Alison.
Christina is saying you mentioned chemical castration, does this replace surgical castration until adulthood is confirmed by further test or was this a choice after the blood test? This is a choice after the blood test. I mean we see it a lot, especially like in the Nordics.
We see it in countries like Germany, where, where the whole veterinary ecosystem goes towards chemical castration, because it keeps the dock kind of semi-intact. You don't take out an organ or like a tissue, which gets more and more problematic. That's why this chemical castration topic is popping up kind of every week.
Yeah, and yeah, and I, I mean, yeah, I did it as well with my dog and I think it was a good decision so you can see how, how, how, how the behaviour will change when the dog is, is being castrated, but it's still reversible, so yeah. And I think in Germany castration in Spain is considered a mutilation, isn't it, so it's that has to be a very good reason to do it, I think, so chemical castration is very much the culture as you say in Germany and the Nordics. Whereas I think in the UK there is a much more of a tendency to go and to castrate or to spay.
And that's one focus for our longevity annual because if you do chemical castration, then you can use a longevity test to show when you need to implant or or reinject with the chemical castration agent. Yeah. Yeah, brilliant.
And I've just had Buddy R, chief feline Officer sitting on my knees, nearly 20 so I think he's out of the question for any treatment here, but Tracy's saying, is there anything similar for cats? And would that include spay where I really was left inside? Is that something that you're working on, Ollie?
I hand over this, this question to, to Alison. Yeah. So, the ovarian remnant, syndrome, we, Helen can attest to this.
We've tested it in both, dogs and cats, at the lab, at Nationwide Labs. So, yes, it does work for cats, as well as dogs. Brilliant Kelly's asking the question just around the Supra Laurin, which was one that I was thinking of as well, so thanks for bringing it up, Kelly.
Could you use supralurine for patients that aren't mature yet or should you still hold off using it until the animal is mature? So you want to allow the animal to have adult levels of circulating hormones, because this, this is what trigger, this is what soaks all of the organs in those hormones and triggers those adult life processes. So for example, you'll trigger the growth of the growth plates, and once that's triggered and that motion is set in place, then that process will continue.
You'll trigger the vascularization of the heart, once that's triggered, The process will continue even if you take the hormones away after that process. So, yeah, we don't want to be chemically castrating when the dogs are young, either, because that's the same as removing the hormones. You, you basically want, Some adult circulating levels, and at that point, all of your hormones have been imprinted, and then it's safer to neuter, oh sorry, yeah, safer to neuter or, or spay.
Oh, that's, that's brilliant, Alison, so really we still should be doing the test before we give slurine or do a castration. In, in, in a, in a young dog, yes. Yeah, Ollie, for, for you, Nicola is saying when will the female version be available and then Sylvia is saying, what is your timeline for launching in the US?
Very good question. So, female version will be available this year. That's the next, that's the next product in the pipeline.
And launching in the US depends. We already started to negotiate. We got approached by a couple of labs.
So, Up to that point there is nothing signed, but I think that that can be available faster than we expected, so it was more planned towards the next year, but as I said, currently things are going quite rapidly, so I think it can be available even this year. Sylvia, I, I would suggest that you speak to your labs and say if this is a test you want, you er get them to get in touch with Ollie. Yeah, I would also recommend like drop us an email to [email protected] as you can see it on the slide and we know that you're interested so we can keep you updated once the test is available in the USA.
Yeah, Caroline is saying I'm I'm one for Helen. Er can samples be sent via bath lab? Yeah, sure.
We get samples from most of the main labs because we're obviously the specialist lab, so we do an awful lot of stuff that no one else does. So yes, absolutely, we get a lot of work from that lab. Brilliant.
I think one question to add to Helen, I've heard that also veterinarians from Germany sent you samples, so yes, we have a massive, account with, a very big company. You can probably mention their name, IDX. Idex Germany have always sent us a lot of work, yes, and we get a couriered frozen sample once a week.
And Ireland is no problem. No, no, yeah, I mean, it's. It's, we send a lot of samples to America.
We are at the moment encountering a lot of problems with Because of things that are going on, so our samples are getting delayed. This obviously going forward is an issue from other countries, but in the UK there should be no problem at all. And I noticed one of the questions was, if you send into Blackpool, are they referring elsewhere?
Blackpool is our headquarters, our nationwide labs headquarters, main lab. They operate a lot of couriers, lockboxes, etc. We don't have that here, but anything that our main Blackpool lab don't do come down to us and we do all the specialist endocrine stuff for them anyway.
So if your sample goes into Blackpool via your normal courier or whatever, it'll come down to us. And I also saw questions around Australia. Maybe Alison can comment on it if it's, yeah, well, we've got import licences for most of the countries around the world that we receive samples from, and we have Australia and New Zealand on our licences.
I noticed someone from UAAE also asked, yes, we have UAE on our import licence, so they can all. Certainly be sent in, they need to be couriered so via FedEx or a similar DHL or similar courier to get here quickly. Yeah, I think there's been complications with Brexit where things go in the post and then you've got to pay customs duty and things, so it's, it's worth investigating it cos.
Nobody wants to lose a sample. Yeah, you need to go, you need to courier by one of the recognised, and most of the time stuff comes in fine. Great, Mike is saying from your data, is there a wide range of age for sexual maturity in individual breeds, such as, for example, the Jack Russell Terrier that you mentioned.
Yeah, so just as you didn't go through puberty at the same time as your brother or your friends, that's the same for dogs, so even within breeds, there's, there's quite a difference when they go through hormonal maturity, and we don't know what triggers puberty at the moment. There's environmental factors, there's genetic factors. The weight, your weight, your environmental stress, those endocrine disruptive chemicals that Ollie referred to earlier, these can all influence the time of puberty, so the different household environments can influence, so, yeah, that's why it's a fifty-fifty, coin toss with that Benjamin Hart data.
Brilliant, thanks, Alison. Obviously we're talking a lot about, and it was always my kind of feeling, you know, not to neuter, too early, however, we also know, or the data was suggesting, you know, when I was neutering animals that if you left it too late you were more likely to get things like ovarian, well, obviously ovarian, sorry, mammary tumours. Do we know any of the work of that, you know, is, is it the risk of late neutering, is that making, More animals likely to suffer from marmary tumours and so on.
That was a question from Lee's. Well, we're not, we're not advocating for late neutering either. What we're advocating for is allow your dog to go through hormonal maturity, which is adult levels of hormones, and if you, if you do the test and you show that, that the hormones have been circulating, then at that point, that's when we're advocating, That it's safer to to neuter, we're not saying after that wait for another 1 or 2 years, yeah, all they do wanna, No, I, I'm, I'm fully confirmed and it's a, it's a discussion around female dogs, and I, I know this is the same as you, Anthony.
So, and I think it's still the case for female dogs, as you said, like when you consider to do it and you should do it before 2 years, that's how I have learned it, and I think Sandra confirmed it, so. So we basically provide a tool that allows you to wait, you, you miss the, if you use our tool, you can actually miss early neutering because they've gone through hormonal maturity and neuter at a point where they're not late neutering and it's not early neutering. It's at the point, yeah, we, we, we give you a scientific basis for for this is the best time if you are going to neuter.
They're not exposed to hormones for a long period of time, they're not exposed to hormones for not at all, so it gives you a timing check. And and there is a good comment on the chat, so WSAVA and as well UC Davis guidelines, they, they, they pull out breeds that should not be neutered at all, so. And that's coming back.
We're not political. We just say once you take the decision, please, please do it right. So and, and we are, we're not, we, we're the least persons that, that try to push you and say you have to neuter your dog.
No, we want to, when you consider to do it. No matter the circumstances why we give you a tool. To give you clarity at the right time.
Yeah, final question, I'm slightly off the topic but also excited about some of the things that you're talking about for the future, and Sarah said with the longevity test in the pipeline, will that help detect hormone-based skin disease like the sex-linked alopecia, and this was where I used to send all my samples off to Helen for, so yeah, if, if anybody wants to share on that more futuristic topic. Yeah, no, absolutely. So any, any, disease that's associated with any of the steroid hormones, the longevity annual, or we'll be able to detect, those, so whether the hormones are high or whether the hormones are low, we, we've detected, there's an acute case that we've detected in nationwide, Helen can speak about it, but, There was a a male dog that was with his female owner who was just started hormone replacement therapy, the dog was licking the hormone replacement therapy, and we could detect with that assay that, or with the test that the dog had high oestrogen levels, a a a young male dog, so it can detect any hormonal, Imbalance, and with the longevity, what we'll also do is a hormone, testosterone to eat your dial ratio, and then that will be able to pick up some of your early detection of some of, your cancer, so if you don't neuter your dog has testes, it would be a great detection tool for, for testicular cancer, for example.
Fantastic thanks Alison, thanks Oliver, just a final one, just somebody not familiar with chemical castration, is it done awake or under anaesthesia, it's just an injection and, There's not really much, there can be pain from the injection, but usually it's, it's fine, it's er, it's a drug available certainly in the UK I'm not sure where else in the world it is, but er it it's something we can do for people who don't want to put their dogs through an anaesthetic. So, thank you so much, it's such an interesting topic, we can see that by the numbers. Yes, go on Alison.
Cos what somebody's asked, can the test be used in rabbits, so. The androgen receptor is common across all species, OK, even salmon, even salmon. I've tested in salmon.
So yes, we can do rabbits, we can do other rodents, in my laboratory we've done mice, like laboratory mice, so it's, it's species agnostic. So if you have a ferret that you want tested, we can do that, yep. And did you say salmon as well, Alison?
Yeah, salmon, like fish. Yeah, I don't, I don't think I fancy trying to castrate one though. Yeah, yeah, but you can test, you can test for hormones in your salmon which is if you want to.
Thanks for that extra information. Obviously, we'll pass all this information on to the, the team, and if there are any, outstanding issues, either come back that you feel has not been answered, do feel free to email info at in situgen.com.
Or come back to us and we can make sure that those questions get across at the webinar bet. So thank you everyone for listening, thank you so much Helen and nationwide for making the webinar possible, and thank you Alison and Ollie for the great work you're doing with the test. I can see a real place for it in veterinary practise, so we'll be interested perhaps in a year to to see more data coming through and interesting results that we're getting from it as well.
So thanks once again, thanks Helen and Nationwide. Thank you to Alison and Ollie and looking forward to seeing people on another webinar very soon. Take care and have a great rest of the day wherever you're listening in from.
Bye bye. Thank you.
