Research is Expensive
Where is the research?
Rejuvecat would like to develop rejuvenation treatments for cats. You can read our blogs about feline, health, nutrition, and care. I have shared some stories about how our cats lived and died.
What about the future?
It is our intention to research and develop true rejuvenation treatments for cats. A lot of this would probably be applicable to other pets and people as well so there would be enormous benefits beyond cats. So what is the holdup? Regulatory hurdles and money.
Many of you might be familiar with the cost of drug development in the United States. A single drug typically costs well over a billion dollars to develop and achieve approval. With the recent inflation explosion, the cost is probably more in the range of 2 to 3 billion right now. It usually doesn't cost that much to get pet medications approved, but it is still in the range of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
In order to avoid some of the high costs of drug development, Rejuvecat investigated known supplements "generally regarded as safe" (GRAS). With this approach, there is less time and money spent on paperwork and initial exploratory lab work. Still, we did end up paying a consultant $3,000 to look at a particular plant supplement that could be beneficial for cats. This gave us a starting point and some idea as to the experimental and regulatory process.
Pablo could have used some rejuvenation treatments later in life. Here he is at a younger age.
Next, we reached out to a contract research organization (CRO - Ichor Life Sciences) to find out if they could run an experiment on cats. Unfortunately, they only work with mice and they did not want to start up with other animals. (Otherwise, Ichor is an amazingly well-run company focused upon rejuvenation - check them out!).
Ichor staff suggested using a different CRO that works with many other animals. Sadly, the cost of doing an experiment with 5 cats would be $25,000 per cat - and that was 3 years ago! With out-of-control inflation over the last couple of years, that cost has probably doubled. In addition, $25,000 per cat was only for a PK/tox study, which stands for pharmacokinetics and toxicology. This is a study where the animals take the therapeutic and then blood is drawn to see how much of the substance makes it into the bloodstream. The toxicology part is when the researchers give the animals increasing dosages until they die in order to find out what range of dosages are safe.
Let me pause for a second for you to recover from that last sentence. Yes, this happens very often in animal experiments. It seems cruel, but it has been going on for decades and most human drugs that are currently on the market had toxicology studies done in animals.
Don't worry, Rejuvecat is absolutely against any toxicology experiment that increases the dosage to the point of death. In any case, it is too expensive at this point in time.
Nebula is hoping for some rejuvenation treatments to arrive soon.
One alternative we are exploring is paid-for trials. These are trials where the pet owners would cover the cost of the research. For example: Rejuvecat would like to test the above-mentioned plant-based senolytic in a sufficiently large number of cats. We would work with a local veterinarian to administer the drug and take blood draws. The pet owner would pay for the vet visit, blood draw, and blood test, as well as a portion of the regulatory cost. From what we have seen, this can cost a couple of thousand dollars per cat, depending upon the length of treatment and the substance being tested. This would still be rather expensive for most pet owners I know, so such a trial would likely need to be conducted in a larger urban area.
Another option is to either raise funds from investors (cat-loving investors) or apply for grant money.
In any case, that is an update on the current state of affairs at Rejuvecat. We have informally tested some nutritional supplements with a small handful of cats, the results have been good, and that will be the subject of a future article.