Breakthrough A
IN BREAKDOWNS By Glen Latham
A proudly Western Australain company has been working tirelessly over the past few years on research into early detection of lameness. With the racing industry here and interstate recently throwing their support behind this passionate team the research looks set for major boost.
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erth based company TelemedVET is making great strides in identifying horses susceptible to breakdown using a blood test and a scan, having the veterinary world take notice, and are on the cusp of embarking on major research projects backed by soon to be announced industry grants. Formed in 2018, Chris Cowcher and Pete Tually’s company TelemedVET is a driving force in research into the early detection of skeletal changes leading to breakdowns, the scourge of our industry. A nuclear medicine practitioner by trade, the quiet excitement in Pete’s voice is palpable when the topic turned to the advances the company has made into the early detection of stress fractures. “A few years ago we fitted out and repurposed some very high-quality medical imaging equipment that was previously used on humans, allowing us to move around the horse and create the world’s first 3-D image of the pelvic region and spine, in particular.” This advancement in determining the cause of lameness in a horse that presented in discomfort was an excellent start, but Pete and Chris believed their new technology could take things much further. Pete explained that despite significant advances over the past two decades equine science had very much piggy backed research in humans, however the principles in application hadn’t kept pace. “In humans 95% of the patients undergoing nuclear scintigraphy were sent because they had a symptom - pains, a lump, shortness of breath or something similar. Now 60-70% of those patients are turning up because of a blood test where a spike in, say, their PSA level, has identified an issue. So in humans the focus has changed greatly where in horses the emphasis on the musculoskeletal system is lagging behind.” Recognising there was an opportunity to greatly
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improve the welfare of the horse and rider, and to reduce the owner’s veterinary bills, Pete and Chris started thinking creatively. “Stress fractures of the pelvis are very hard to diagnose without a particular scintigraphy scan, so I was wondering what research had been done in trying to predict which horse might have a fracture and found that researchers from 1015 years ago were looking at a blood test. With that I thought could I look at a blood test in conjunction with the scanner system and artificial intelligence to see if we could identify if there is something ‘spiking’ in the blood, as with cancer patients. That would show either the bone is not adapting to the work, or in a worse scenario the bone is now on the way to a stress fracture and lameness.” Pete explained the path the current research has taken and where things stand at present. “We started the research around three years ago, and with the advances in technology from when the original research was undertaken I was able to find a way of using artificial intelligence to better work out which one of these chemicals is the one we need to focus on. In a trial of 60 horses with stress fractures, in 85% of them the chemical Osteocalcin (OC) was sky-high in their blood. Going forward, identifying high levels of OC potentially meant we could tell trainers two things: firstly, when to take their foot off the pedal because the horse is at the point where the injury means the horse is never going to be the same again, or conversely, they need to give the horse more work because the level is too low. The trainer has to find the sweet spot. Precision medicine and artificial intelligence is all about finding out what is the horse’s normal range, like the lactic acid range of any athlete at say the Institute of Sport, and if you track it over time you will be able to avoid lameness or a fracture.”
