By Melissa Smith, Outreach & Communications Officer
Something has gone quietly wrong in the lives of our precious pets and livestock. Dogs are developing obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer at rates that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. Cats are being prescribed thyroid medication and insulin. Dairy cows are suffering metabolic disorders with increasing frequency. And now, a San Francisco biotech startup is on the cusp of becoming the first company in history to bring a longevity drug to market— not for humans, but dogs.
This is not simply about devoted pet owners and medical progress. It’s a discussion about how the same forces driving the chronic disease epidemic in humans are now operating across the entire animal world — and how the pharmaceutical industry has identified this as one of the most lucrative growth markets of the coming decade. It also digs into the introduction of novel vaccine technologies into the animal health space that could potentially enter the human food chain, a global governance framework positioning animals, under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ‘One Health’ initiative, as disease reservoirs requiring pharmaceutical management, along with the explicit use of companion animals as a stepping stone to human drugs. These threads are not separate. They are woven from the same cloth.
A peer-reviewed study published in late 2025 documented a sharp global rise in non-communicable (chronic) diseases in animals — not just pets, but livestock and even wildlife under human care. The conditions were striking in their familiarity: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, degenerative joint disease and cancer, all increasing across species.
The factors identified as driving this are precisely those driving the human chronic disease crisis: ultra-processed diets, reduced physical activity, environmental pollutant exposure, chronic stress and selective breeding that prioritises commercial traits over physiological resilience. A 2026 paper in Frontiers in Veterinary Science notes that the epidemiological evidence linking ultra-processed food to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegeneration in humans is now prompting serious scrutiny of what we feed our animals — most of which is highly processed, dry, kibble, manufactured on the same industrial logic as ultra-processed human food: shelf stability, palatability engineering and cost efficiency above nutritional integrity. None of it even remotely resembles the natural, species-specific foods that have ensured their survival through evolution. The foods that their bodies understand.
The pet food market is now converging with the industrial transformation of the food system itself. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently issued its first “no questions” letter for a precision-fermentation-derived protein to be used in US pet food, opening the door to lab-grown and synthetic ingredients entering mainstream animal diets. UK company, Meatly, aims to provide lab-grown chicken for use in pet foods in the next 3-5 years. Presented as sustainable and innovative, these products further shift animal health away from traditional feeding and husbandry toward technologically engineered feed systems, rather than natural foods.
All chronic disease states have root causes. They are not simply the inevitable fate of an ageing animal. In nature, animals live well until they pass. They do not spend the last third of their lives limping with chronic disease. But, as with humans, well animals are of no interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
The global animal healthcare market was valued at approximately $73 billion in 2025, with veterinary pharmaceuticals alone growing at over 6% per year with a 9-11% growth forecast by 2034. The companion animal segment is the fastest-growing area, driven by what market analysts describe, with revealing candour, as “pet humanisation.”
Regulatory agencies have established accelerated approval pathways for novel veterinary interventions that are significantly faster and less costly than those for human drugs. The animal health sector is not merely servicing the chronic disease epidemic in animals. It is also a proving ground for technologies destined for human medicine.
US start-up, Loyal aims to create the first FDA-approved drug for ageing itself, using dogs as the testing ground. Its drugs target IGF-1, a hormone linked to growth and lifespan. The FDA has already accepted major parts of Loyal’s application to enable it to bring the first veterinary longevity drug closer to market.
But the real significance may be human ageing. Loyal has openly acknowledged links between its canine research and the crossover to human longevity treatments. Dogs are attractive models because they share our homes, diets and environments, making them a real-world bridge between veterinary and human medicine.
There is also a deeper irony. The drug targets metabolic dysfunction closely tied to overfeeding and processed diets — problems already known to influence both healthspan and lifespan. Rather than addressing those causes, the treatment manages their effects, extending a familiar pattern from human healthcare into veterinary medicine: chronic disease created by lifestyle and environment becomes the new pharmaceutical frontier.
While longevity drugs attract public attention, a quieter transformation is already underway in animal medicine: the rapid introduction of self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) vaccines into companion animals and livestock, with little public debate about long-term implications or entry into the human food chain.
Here’s the kicker. These technologies are already in use!
Merck’s Sequivity platform has been deployed in US pigs since 2018 for customised RNA-based vaccines against swine diseases, while Nobivac NXT saRNA vaccines for canine flu, feline leukaemia and rabies are now licensed in North America. Research is advancing rapidly into poultry and cattle applications. Yet products from RNA-vaccinated animals currently require no specific labelling in most jurisdictions.
Unlike conventional vaccines, saRNA constructs contain replication machinery derived from alphaviruses, allowing the RNA to amplify itself inside cells and prolong antigen production from very small doses. This increased biological activity is central to the technology’s commercial appeal, but also raises questions about biodistribution, persistence, reproductive transfer and long-term exposure that remain insufficiently studied in food-producing animals.
Regulators argue that withdrawal periods prevent residues entering the food chain, but these frameworks were designed for conventional pharmaceuticals rather than self-amplifying genetic constructs. Publicly available long-term toxicology and biodistribution data remain limited, particularly regarding repeated exposure across industrial farming systems.
The concern is not only the technology itself, but the regulatory philosophy surrounding it. Veterinary approval pathways are often faster and less precautionary than those used in human medicine, creating incentives to scale novel biotech platforms first through animals before wider human application. Once deployed across livestock systems, exposure expands from millions of animals to entire populations of consumers — without labelling, informed consent or long-term post-market evidence.
This reflects a broader pattern: increasingly complex biological technologies are being introduced at industrial scale before foundational questions about necessity, transparency and long-term safety have been fully resolved.
These developments are not occurring in isolation. They are unfolding within the rapidly expanding framework of “One Health” — the WHO-backed model that links human, animal and environmental health into a single global management system.
On the surface, the idea sounds reasonable: human and animal health are clearly interconnected. But One Health is not simply a scientific observation. It is also a governance model, increasingly tied to pandemic preparedness, biosecurity surveillance and coordinated pharmaceutical intervention across species.
Under the One Health framework, animals are increasingly viewed primarily through the lens of pandemic risk — as potential reservoirs of zoonotic disease requiring constant monitoring, genetic surveillance and rapid-response pharmaceutical control. This creates a powerful institutional justification for expanding vaccine platforms, genomic tracking and novel biotech interventions throughout both companion animals and livestock.
The concern is that One Health risks becoming less about improving the underlying health of ecosystems and more about building a permanent infrastructure for pharmaceutical management at population scale. Regulatory pathways developed in veterinary medicine can then serve as testing grounds and precedents for wider human applications, particularly in areas such as RNA vaccines, genomic medicine and longevity therapeutics.
What is often missing from the conversation is serious scrutiny of the industrial systems driving many of these problems in the first place. Intensive farming, ultra-processed animal feed, environmental toxicity, biodiversity loss and habitat destruction all increase chronic disease burden and zoonotic spillover risk. Yet these upstream root causes receive far less attention than surveillance technologies and pharmaceutical countermeasures.
From our ANH perspective, this reflects a far deeper imbalance. Rather than prioritising resilient food systems, optimal metabolic health, ecological restoration and disease preventive approaches, the dominant One Health model increasingly favours centralised monitoring, rapid vaccine deployment and technologically managed risk. The result is a world in which the response to systemic biological damage is not to address and remove the causes, but to expand the infrastructure designed to manage its consequences for maximum commercial gain.
We already know a great deal about what keeps animals healthy: species-appropriate natural, evolutionary-rational nutrition, minimal ultra-processing, physical activity, reduced toxin exposure, lower chronic stress and greater genetic resilience. For livestock, in addition to that list, farming conditions themselves — crowding, confinement and feed quality — are primary determinants of health outcomes.
The same principles apply to humans. Food system reform, environmental improvements and better husbandry would address many of the underlying causes of chronic disease in animals. But prevention is far less commercially attractive than lifelong treatment.
This is the deeper irony of the longevity drug market. Dogs may well gain additional healthy years through pharmaceutical intervention. But many of those same gains could likely be achieved more simply through biologically appropriate diets, exercise and healthier environments — by addressing the causes of metabolic dysfunction rather than medicating its consequences.
Animal health has become a biotech proving ground, where longevity drugs, saRNA vaccines, genomic surveillance and chronic disease management converge under One Health. Animals now function as both patients and experimental systems, bridging veterinary care, food production and future human medicine.
The underlying cycle is consistent: industrial systems generate chronic disease, pharmaceuticals manage it, and regulation accelerates adoption.
Pet medicalisation points to a broader shift—towards treating ageing, immunity and metabolism as conditions requiring continuous technological control rather than outcomes of lifestyle and environment. What is tested in animals today anticipates how human health will be defined tomorrow. The counter-position is preventive health rooted in evolutionary rational nutrition, movement, stress management and environmental integrity.
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One Response
I have numerous petsitting clients and many (if not most) of the animals I take care of are on some kind of medication, including insulin injections. I don’t remember any animals on drugs when I was growing up. Now it seems to be considered normal.