Designer drugs

Today I was going through the vet times news letter and I saw something that caught my eye. Designer drugs. Now this interests me because I know everyone is different and so is every animal so the fact that they are thinking about the production of these drugs within the next ten years is phenomenal. Because it could revolutionise the way we treat animals, both companion and livestock.

The article was based on what professor John Harding, professor in swine production medicine at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. He said that the way we vaccinate the swine livestock and companion sectors is with the view that one size fits all. This is not the case. He said that we need to be more cognisant about the fact that every animal is different to its neighbours. Genetically we are all different which causes us and animals to have different reactions to vaccines. So we need to accept that all of these animals are heterogeneous and we need to adapt our methods of treatment to accommodate these differences. 

He suggests that this can be done by genetic profiling where genotyping is done on the blood of an animal to work out the animals geology and how susceptible it is to diseases and it's overall disease resilience. 

So in the future hopefully, all food-producing animals will have a kind of genomic profile within their records, which will inform  anyone dealing with the animals how susceptible or resilient they are to various diseases.

So a vet could look at this animals profile  and create the treatment or vaccination strategy with regards to these profiles. The same principles could also be applied to companion animals.

He finishes off by saying that hopefully some time in the near future we will be able to develop this technique so that it is part of common medicine. Like they are now accepting it into human medicine. If this could be applied to livestock it could revolutionise the way we look at disease control. 

I found this really interesting. Because I know and understand that we do have a problem with antimicrobial resistance and this new technology would aid in the reduction of this issue and other issues that may arise in the future especially with livestock because this would mean safer meats and other animal products and less bioaccumulation. 

I'm not exactly sure how they will make this cost effective doing the genealogy on all the livestock animals would take a very long time and it would require a lot of equipment. So for it to work we would need to develop technology that allows this process to be done quickly and efficiently.