Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar Vet welcoming you to another episode of Vet Chat. I'm really, really pleased today to have Noga Shiller who is from Bageel Labs on the line today. We're gonna be talking all about titers for vaccines, a lot of exciting things.
But before we start, Noga, I'd love you to just give us a little introduction so people know who you are. I know you're a veterinary surgeon. But obviously just let people know a little bit about yourself.
Sure, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. So my name is, Noga. I am a veterinarian.
I studied in Milan in Italy, and then I practised, in small animal practises with, like a general practitioner for cats and dogs. And then in the last few years I've been working as the veterinary medical advisor at Biogal Labs. And tell us a little bit about Bergirl because obviously I think a lot of people will know you for your work with VaccineCheck, you know that you can check for vaccine cheetahs, but you know you are bigger than that and I was fascinated, you know, as we were chatting before to know that originally you started off very much in bovine and poultry but you've moved very much.
More strongly into small animal in in the the the not so recent past but in the last few years, right, right, so Biogal has been around for a while. We're actually celebrating 40 years this year of Biogal and happy birthday. Thank you.
I, I haven't been around for 40 years, but the company, yeah, exactly. So yeah, the company did start with poultry and with bovine, but I would say in the last few decades. We've been more focused on small animals diagnostics, even though we do still have our poultry and bovine and lines of diagnostics.
Basically, it is true that vaccineCheck is what we usually talk about a lot, but it's not our only product. The base of the company is to basically bring diagnostics in clinic. So we try to kind of cover all the different diagnostic lines.
We have Eliza serology. We have IGG or IGM tests. We have PCR in-house.
Tests. So instead of having to send it out to a lab and wait in some cases for days or even weeks for results, we brought that in clinic so it can all be done in less than 2 hours. You can have molecular diagnostics in your clinic.
We do also have the more simple lateral flow test, the, the simple antigen tests for, you know, when you need like speed and ease. And then we do have, kind of our flagship product, which is VacyCheck, an in-house titer test. Just before we move on to vaccine, it it's really fascinating, with diseases like Brucilla and Ehrlichia, you know, these are diseases that are growing with the, the climate change and so on and we're seeing them in the UK.
So they're really, really important tests to be able to do quickly as, as those diseases become more common. Absolutely. I mean, we are a global company.
A lot of our diagnostics do focus on our tick-borne diseases, so the lechia and a plasma, babezia, hepatozone, and then like you said, we also have Bruceella. We have a tonne of different diseases we diagnose, but you're, you are. Absolutely right.
I mean, these are diseases that are very prevalent in the more tropical areas in the hotter countries, but we are slowly, unfortunately, seeing them also in the more colder countries like the UK where we do see that there's an increase in, in anaplasma and ehrlichia and all of those kind of tick-borne diseases that in the past we would see them mainly in the hotter countries. Yeah, fascinating and obviously the answer is always if we can is to get a vaccine so we can protect against those diseases. So we get the vaccine, you know, we take the small puppy or kitten, we vaccinate it and historically I remember, you know, we would vaccinate a dog, we'd get it back the next year and then because we weren't doing reminders for people, we often wouldn't see them for a long time but those diseases, weren't that common once you know they'd had a few vaccines, and I think you're showing now with your data that in fact.
What you know when we were vaccinating every year for the dogs that came in regularly, we were probably overdoing it a bit, weren't we? Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it is true that we do have also diagnostic kits for our main topic of discussion, which is our distemper and our parvovirus.
But like you said, and I absolutely agree with that, that we want to prevent these diseases. We don't wanna, we don't wanna diagnose and treat these diseases. We want to prevent them, and that is the most important thing, and that is where vaccineCheck, it comes in.
So, yes, absolutely, like you said, it used to be in the not so distant past that we were vaccinating once a year. For parvo distemper and adenovirus, and we've known for years that this is probably way too much. We're vaccinating way too often.
So the, the latest guidelines, the last I would say 6 or 7 years, I think already have kind of already changed that into a vaccination protocol of once every 3 years for our 3 core vaccines of parvo, distemper and adenovirus. But we do know, and these are studies that have been done at this point, I think for at least 20 years, we've had studies done on duration of immunity for these core vaccines, and these vaccines are lasting much longer. Longer than even these 3 years in the majority of dogs.
Now it is important to say that this is the majority of dogs, because part of where titer testing comes in is to also catch those dogs that they're not lasting for years. But in the 90+% of dogs, we see a duration of immunity for 789 years, even a lifetime after they had their kind of proper puppy vaccination series and then their 1 year vaccine. And it's interesting because I, I've not practised for 10 years, but what I did at the time was I said, well, you know, we're not gonna do distemper every year or, or Parvo, or I don't know, but we will doleto all the time, because, you know, it's a disease that the immunity seems to be less, and we do see cases of it occasionally, it's a zoonotic disease, you know, I don't want that disease to get into the family, so.
Giving a vaccine seemed a sensible option, of course it, it, it, because also it's a a bacteria rather than a virus I think it acts slightly differently and there's not maybe that strong, humoral immunity which is why we need to boost it more often. Right, right, so in general when we're kind of when we're discussing duration of immunity. And we had discussed this before, where it said that non-vaccines are created, not all vaccines are created equal because that's absolutely true.
Not all vaccines work the same. There's two main, kind of categories that influence how long the duration of immunity is, and that one is the pathogen. In itself, how it works, how it infects, is it a bacteria?
Is it a virus? Is it a protozo, all of those can change how the duration of immunity of the vaccine. And the second point is the vaccine itself.
Are we using a modified live vaccine? Are we using a killed vaccine? Those also change the duration of immunity.
So that's absolutely true that for leptospira, titer testing is not exactly the correct tool to use for a few reasons, and one of those is that the IgG levels don't necessarily strongly correlate with protection. The second one is, like you had said, these are vaccines that we do need to give yearly. We do know that the duration of immunity sometimes doesn't even last the full year, so there isn't much of a point to tighter tests.
This is very differently from parvo distempered adenovirus that these are vaccines, these are modified live vaccines, so they stimulate a really strong immune response. We do know that these viruses are mainly kind of defeated by our humeral immunity by our antibodies. So we do know that evaluating IgG antibody levels is a really, really useful tool for these three viruses.
And it also gives peace of mind that you know the pet owner knows that their animal is fully protected, it's part of a check, you know, it's a, I presume a little bit of blood that's pulled out to do that test. So it's pretty non-invasive, isn't it? Right, it is, it literally requires a drop of blood to do a vaccine check.
So you need either 10 microliters of whole blood or 5 microliters of serum, so it's a drop of blood, it's really minimally invasive. And yes, it will give us a lot of information, so it's not just about let's skip vaccines, let's do less, which is also important. It is about checking protection, it is about knowing that this specific dog is individualising our, our preventive care, it's about knowing that this specific dog is protected or is not protected and does need another vaccine.
And this is a test that we do in-house for the vaccine check. Right, it doesn't need to come to the lab. Exactly.
It is a completely in-house test. It takes 23 minutes to run the test, so you can get an answer by the end of the appointment. You can start at the beginning, draw the blood, and by the end of the appointment, you're gonna know if that dog needs his booster shot or not.
Yeah, so, I mean, in most dogs, you're going to find out that they do not need their booster shot. But for the dogs that do, you don't have to kind of bring them back to the clinic to get their booster shot. They're, they're still already there.
And it's, yeah, it's really simple to run, really easy, but it is important for me to say that. Ease of use, cost, all those things are important, but is, is it a reliable test? I think it's always really important to talk about because we want it to be lab quality.
So all of our products, including vaccineCheck, are all externally validated and compared to gold standard methods. So it's important for us to not just bring it in clinic, but that this is really lab level results that you're getting, so you can really depend on the results. And, and I presume.
Within a sensitivity and a specificity sense you know really high that if that result comes through and we don't vaccinate, you don't have cases where people are coming back, With those diseases, right, so we don't want that to happen. So we do have sensitivity and specificity scores for, again, for all of our products, but specifically vaccineCheck also because it's been around for a while. Then on top of these scores, we do always support external independent studies to do their own studies to compare us to gold standard methods and to give their own sensitivity and specificity scores for our products.
I, I think it's, it's interesting cos obviously you know you read the news in human and in, you know, more so in human probably of, of people who are vaccine deniers and I I think from my perspective it's, It's so important, you know, I, I've lived long enough as a vet to see distemper and Parvo and they're really, really unpleasant diseases, so I'm a proponent of vaccine. But at the same time if you're using a vaccine that you don't need to use, there is actually a cost, not only financial cost but actually producing the vaccine has a carbon cost, it has a cost to the environment, so actually the more we can use the vaccine in the right places, er the better, you know, we don't want to just in case, give vaccines. Right, right, I absolutely agree.
I mean, I think everything has a price and everything we do in veterinarian medicine is assessing, you know, risk and benefit. So I completely agree with you that we do not want Parvo. We do not want December, that we've all seen Parvo and December cases.
We don't want to see them anymore, but, but the flip side shouldn't be just annually vaccinating for no reason. That shouldn't be the flip side. The flip side should be using tools like vaccine check to check protection and kind of like what we said at the beginning, it's not just about reducing vaccines.
It's about also making sure these dogs are actually protected. But yes, I mean, absolutely, we, we should be reducing unnecessary preventive care. We, we should be reducing that because if we know that the dog is protected, there really is absolutely no reason to re-vaccinate.
And I think this is what we as vets are talking about this more in the last few years also with do we need to worm that dog every 3 months, do we need to give it flea treatment every month, every 2 months, every 3 months. So I think it's really important that we we use where we need to use and obviously you know with some of the products there's a, there is an environmental component to that as well. I, I wanted to talk a little bit again with my er hat on as a vet who's probably vaccinated quite a few dogs in my time and one of the controversial areas was very much around, Vaccinating a puppy, you know, when you vaccinated a puppy, when it was actually immune and able to go out, you know it was 8 weeks, it was 10 weeks, it was 12 weeks, whatever the dates were, could you give it at 6 weeks and then we have that problem where if we gave it too early, we could actually be obstructing the maternally derived antibodies, and particularly in some species, and I remember the two that, you know I was worried about were, well particularly Rottweilers but also Dobermans.
Do you find that you're using the test, In those areas as well and I'd be really fascinated. If you've got any data on it to know what what is often the situation, you know, at that 16 to 18 week period where we absolutely want to know that those dogs are protected, you know, sometimes 2 vaccines is not enough, is it? Having said we don't want to use too many, then we do want to use the right amount, right, right.
So I, I think I'll start from the beginning kind of when it comes to we definitely use vaccine check as a tool for puppies, but to start from the beginning a little bit, I mean, let's remind ourselves why are we doing these kind of the series of vaccinations. We're doing them because of maternally derived antibodies. We're doing them because we do know.
That the antibodies that the puppy is getting from the mother are blocking the effect of the vaccine. So as long as they're above a certain threshold, the vaccine is not gonna work. What we don't know is when they go down the level that is, is necessary in order for the vaccines to work.
And that is why we are doing these multiple vaccines. Now, the latest guidelines, the latest Wassava guidelines, and this is also something. Relatively recent because we had been vaccinating up until 12 weeks, and the latest guidelines have been saying no, we need to vaccinate until 16 weeks because we do know that there are still dogs that have these maternal antibodies and the vaccines are not working and they are basically staying exposed for the full year until we re-vaccinate them at 1 or 1, 1.5 years of age.
So that was already the first change. But even after this change, we still do see that some puppies, even at 16 weeks of age, have these maternal antibodies and the vaccines aren't working. So also here the Wasava recommendations changed a bit.
The, the most recent Wassava guidelines. Started saying, OK, so let's vaccinate at 20 weeks, or let's consider vaccinating at 6 months and not waiting a year. We keep adding vaccines, and we're adding them because we, we don't want these parvo cases.
We're adding them for good reason. But, and this was also in the guidelines, we kind of want to say let's stop and let's think about what we're doing, and now the current guidelines are also recommending instead of continuing vaccinating, let's tighter test at 20 weeks of age. And let's check if this puppy is protected or not, because the majority of them are going to be protected at that point.
The ones that are still not protected, those are the ones that we're going to want to re-vaccinate, and then we're going to want to recheck titers. Now, why do we want to recheck the titers? We want to check that they're protected, but this is the point where we're going to catch our non-responder dogs.
This is the point. These are the Dobermans and the Rottweilers, but they're not just the Dobermans and the Rottweilers. We see them in all, all types of dogs.
That are not responding to the vaccine. This is most frequent for parvovirus, but you do see it also in distemper, less, but you can also see it in distemper, and these are the dogs that it doesn't matter how much you're going to vaccinate them, they're not going to respond to the vaccine, and they're exposed to disease. And it's really important information to have for the veterinarian, for the client.
So even though we can't continue to vaccinate them. We know, we know that these, these dogs are exposed. They're, they're er not protected fully.
And, and what sort of percentage have you, have you done some studies on, on, you know, large numbers and got an idea of what the percentage is across the population and maybe in these more as we perceive them previously, are they still, would you still class Rottweilers and Dobermans as more at risk? I know you said in other breeds as well, but are they more represented, or was that a bit of a, so I don't really have that information globally as much. I do know, and these are studies done by universities that have shown that, in Rottweilers and in Dobermans in the US, it's a been breeded out because we do know it's genetic, so they're not necessarily as overrepresented for the non-responder dogs as opposed to other breeds.
Studies that have been done have evaluated at around 1 in 500 dogs that are non-responders to parvovirus. So not that rare. It's, you know, not every other dog, but it's also not that rare to have a non-responder dog to parvo.
For distemper, it's about 1 in 5000, so it is rare. And then adenovirus, it is extremely rare to have a non-responder dog, but the parvovirus ones especially, we do wanna, we don't want to catch them. So definitely, so, so the plan, and obviously different vaccine companies have different ideas, but 8, 12 weeks.
And then perhaps at 20 weeks to teeter to tighter test. No, so the recommendation now is at 8, 12, and 16 to vaccinate and then at 20 to tighter test. Right, the 3rd 1.
And is that and how. Again, because I'm not in practise and maybe I need to ask the question, it'd be a really interesting survey question for us to push out to our vets, you know, what actually they are doing if they're giving that third vaccine. Mhm, yeah, I, I, I mean, my feeling is that many vets, not just my feelings, speaking with vets around the world is that many do still stop at 12 weeks of age.
Many do still vaccinate once a year for DHP for parvo distemper and adenovirus. So these the guidelines are saying to do things differently. Sometimes it takes time to actually implement that, yeah, yeah.
But presumably if we do 8 and 12 weeks and then at 20 weeks we test the dogs, then the majority will be protected. The ones that aren't, we could give a vaccine at 20, couldn't we? Yeah, you could, or you can titer test them at 16 weeks of age.
You don't necessarily, the, the reason we're waiting these 4 weeks, most of them already at after 1 or 2 weeks are gonna have, you know, the antibodies are going to have the response to the vaccine. The reason we do recommend to wait 4 weeks is that we also have what are called slow responders. These are dogs that will develop immunity, but it might take a little longer.
What we need to remember when we're tighter testing. With puppies is that our IgGs from the maternal antibodies and the ones from the vaccines, they're the same IgGs. So if we're, so once we vaccinate, and then if we're checking at 10 or 12 weeks, it's a little bit of a problem because then we won't know, are these levels high because of maternal antibodies or are they high because of vaccines.
But I will say that. In, in the Netherlands, for example, and this is really interesting because another way you can use vaccine check in puppies is to track NDA levels, is to track the maternal antibodies levels. So they are not even doing that 1st 6 or 8 week vaccine.
They're tighter testing instead. And then the IgGs, you do know that they're from the maternal antibodies, and they're tracking that, and when they get to a certain level, that's when they're vaccinating. So they're basically only doing one vaccine.
So I suppose the other side is the anamnestic response is very much dependent on, you know, you you give a dog a vaccine, it starts to create some antibodies and then it dies down, then you give another vaccine and you get that, you know, increased response which then hopefully gets you to the tighter level, so the two vaccines as puppies are really important. But as you say, if one of them has been really badly disrupted, maybe we need the 3rd to give us that increased response. Yeah, it's not so much about kind of boosting it up.
I mean, we do, we're still not sure, perhaps, like for example, the guidelines do say for a dog that has not been vaccinated as a puppy and you're seeing him for the first time at 16 weeks of age or older to do 2 at 2 to 4 weeks apart. So there is some sort of recommendation to kind of boost, even though we're not sure that's even necessary. It might not even be necessary, but it's still playing on the safe side.
But when it comes to why the puppies were doing these 34 vaccines, it's not so much about boosting, it's about finding the right moments that we don't know because we're blindly vaccinating them. So a puppy that, for example, at 9 weeks of age already does not have sufficient maternal antibodies for protection, then we don't want to wait till 16 weeks, 16 weeks to vaccinate them for the first time. So that is more the reason why we're doing these multiple vaccines.
So if you're tracking MDA levels, which I know is a bit wild, that's why it's not the more classic way to use vaccineCheck, but when you're tracking MDA levels, then you don't even necessarily need more than one vaccine. You just need a vaccine at the right moment. And then you're gonna recheck and you're gonna see if your antibodies went up, you're good, that puppy does not need another vaccine.
No, it's really interesting. My, I, I went to vet school in 1985, so my immunology information is, is, well I've hopefully kept up to date, you know, I do run the webinar vet, so we do watch stuff and obviously with my dermatology hat on. But so is, is there sort of questioning, and obviously some vaccines only need one vaccine, don't they, but.
That that sort of anamnestic response, you know, that memory response that needed a boost, is that moving a little bit out of fashion. So I think it's just we're at the point where we're not 100% sure yet. There is, I, there is some benefit.
I mean, that's why it is recommended even at the puppy series to do the one year vaccine because there probably is some benefit in kind of boosting a bit the immune response, but in general, the idea of. Boosting the immune response, we kind of know isn't completely true anymore. We do know because vaccine check, for example, it's, it's a semi-quantitative test, OK?
So it's gonna give you a score between 0 and 6. It's not just telling you, yes, it has antibodies or no, it doesn't have antibodies. It's gonna give you a level that correlates with tighter level.
So we do know that a score. 3 to 6 means that the dog has sufficient protective antibodies. So it doesn't matter if the dog has a 3 or 4 or 5 or a 6.
It's not going to be that this dog, if it has a 3 and you give it another vaccine, you're boosting. You're not making the immune response stronger. This immune response is good.
So in that way, yes, the thinking has changed for sure. But then also sometimes we, we have changes in fashion and I again from when I was a young vet, the pink injection with cobalamine was was what all the vets gave, you know, to any dog that came through the door and then 40 years later we're saying how important cobalamine is, so it's fun when we don't know everything, then if we knew everything we wouldn't have to continue to study and to, to do research, would we? I, I wanna just mainly very quickly at the end cos I think the dog stuff has been really fascinating but just talk a little bit about cats.
They are, you know, that when again when I was at vet school, I think one of the first cat textbooks came out and the, the foreword said cats are not small dogs, so they have to, that was the first thing I was thinking. I think every vet has that like implanted in his brain that cats are not small dogs, yeah, I, and I think it, it, it maybe feels a bit different cos with things like Calici virus. Again, you know, I was very keen to probably vaccinate more often in cats than I was in dogs, but I know again the rulings have kind of changed, so for people listening, obviously I think we, we kind of know now that I, I think, you know, tighter testing is a really good idea, but obviously the recommendations are you can vaccinate every 3 years, but you possibly are still a bit over vaccinating at that level.
Tell us a little bit about where cats are. So yeah, it's, I, I always forget that cats aren't small dogs either. I will admit, but they are different.
Specifically for our core vaccines, what we do have also feline vaccine check because specifically for our core vaccines, our panleopenia, our Cavici and or herpes virus, we do know that they're long lasting as well, especially if we're focusing on panleopenia. Which is also still a problem and also still a disease that we're seeing. So for pan panopenia is feline parvovirus.
So it is very, very similar in a lot of aspects to canine parvovirus. So we do know that it's giving this long-lasting immunity. We do know that in the majority of cats, we do have the studies for the cats too.
I Admits a little bit less because we tend to neglect the cats, but we do have these studies for cats that have shown a long duration of immunity for all three of our core vaccines. Now herpes and callousy is a whole other topic. It they do work a little bit different.
The vaccines do work a little bit different, but especially for panlocopin, it, it's very, very similar. It's very similar. So we can definitely also use vaccines.
Check for cats and the current guideline recommendations for cats. So they're a little bit different because with cats we do look a lot at lifestyle as well. So they do separate the indoor cats from the outdoor cats.
Yeah. And for the indoor cats, it is true that the recommendation now is once every 3 years. For outdoor cats, the recommendation is still yearly for what we call kind of the high-risk cats.
So that's a recommendation, even though we do know that with these vaccines, they are very long lasting for cats as well. That's fantastic and you know as a, well, even before I went to vet school, but as a young boy at school, the, the vets opened across the road from me and he was called Vet the Vet, which was a beautiful title for a vet. And I remember very long lines of people waiting to get their dogs vaccinated for Parva virus.
And in the very early stages, in the late 70s, early 80s, we were using cat vaccines. So I know there will be some people on the line who are old enough to remember that, but I always think, you know, with vets who've only been maybe 5, 10 years qualified, they don't know that webinars didn't exist 16 years ago, so they probably don't know that dogs were being vaccinated with cat vaccines. I, I gotta admit I didn't know that either.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't know. No, no, it's been absolutely fantastic, and, and I feel like I've been well taught during this time. I've been educated because it is an area that, you know, we weren't doing a lot of 1020 years ago, we're doing so much more now, and I think that what you're doing is, is amazing and really useful.
So thank you for the work that Bayer Gal's doing and . I wish you all continued success. Thank you, thank you very much for having me, and I just wanna say even the vets that are learning now in 2026 don't necessarily know kind of in-depth about immunology.
So I think these lectures are important, not just for the veterinarians that learned it 30 years ago, also for the ones that are currently learning it. It's a, it's a, it's a pretty in-depth world immunology. It's super interesting, but just like anything in veterinary medicine, it's hard to deep dive on every single topic.
And so that's what we're here for, to kind of give that push and that boost of knowledge about immunology. Yeah, well thank you Noga and you know Baagal for making this possible and and teaching me and and hopefully many other people a little bit more about the intricacies of er of tighter testing. Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.
Brilliant, thank you Noga, and listen, thanks everyone for listening. I hope you have a great rest of the day and we see you on a podcast or a webinar very soon. Take care.
