Sick pets? A biobank hopes to detect diseases early in house cats and dogs – Axios

Help wanted: Mars Petcare is seeking 10,000 dogs and 10,000 cats for a biobank — an aggregation of biological samples, images and other data — that aims to improve the health of house pets by detecting maladies earlier.
Why it matters: Compared with human biobanking, animal biobanking is in its infancy. This initiative may be the largest and most ambitious so far to try to pinpoint what triggers disease in healthy pets by sifting through genomic patterns.
Driving the news: Mars Inc., the giant conglomerate that makes M&M's and Snickers, has a division that runs chains of veterinary hospitals and makes products like Pedigree dog food and Iams cat food. That unit recently announced the new biobank and issued a call for dogs and cats in the U.S. to participate.
Details: Mars is seeking healthy dogs and cats between the ages of 6 months and 10 years. To enroll, the animals need to be clients of certain Mars Petcare veterinary facilities, including VCA and Banfield animal hospitals.
The big picture: Pet-loving Americans are investing more in veterinary care and seeking more genetic information about their housemates — buying DNA kits to learn about their ancestry and medical issues, for example.
Meanwhile, the animal biobanking world is getting more organized and sophisticated.
Some interesting examples:
Between the lines: As animal biobanks accumulate specimens, they're "enhancing the potential of those samples to translate into research innovation — for the sake of the animals and humans," Castelhano told Axios.
What's next: The more samples that Mars Petcare can gather and analyze, the more insights it will glean over time — particularly into rarer diseases that smaller studies with fewer specimens can't fully capture.

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