Episode 41: Parvovirus Research with Morris Animal Foundation

This week on the Good Dog Pod, Laura announces that April is officially Healthy Puppy Month! Good Dog has partnered with Revival Animal Health to support the Morris Animal Foundation with their Parvovirus Research Efforts.

Starting April 1st, 2021 you can visit HealthyPuppyMonth.com to learn more about Parvovirus, hear stories about Parvo survivors and join us in our mission to promote puppy health by signing the Healthy Puppy Pledge. For every signature, Good Dog and Revival will each donate $1 to the Morris Animal Foundation. 

Laura introduces us to our two guests, Dr. Kelly Diehl, the Senior Director of Science and Communications at the Morris Animal Foundation and Dr. Judi Stella.

The Morris Animal Foundation has been around since 1948 when it was founded by Dr. Morris. Kelly introduces us to some of the unique research the Foundation is currently pursuing, including a project on horse behavior as well as donkey pain. Additionally, Kelly discusses the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which was conceived of as a cancer risk study. 3,044 Golden Retrievers were enrolled between the age of 2-6 years old. Every year, the veterinarian and owner of the enrolled dog’s fill out a questionnaire (which is over 100 pages!), as well as creating a hair, blood, feces, nails and urine bank every year. The cost of the study, you may ask? $32 million.

Shifting gears to Parvovirus. Parvovirus is a horrible disease, which grows in rapidly dividing cells. The disease affects the GI tract, as well as bone marrow. Common symptoms include smelly, bloody diarrhea (Laura emphasized just how smelly it is) and a low white cell count, which is usually used as a diagnosis. Additional tests are then used to confirm. Luckily, vaccines were developed to tackle Parvo, but it has not been entirely eliminated. 

This virus has mutated over time, which led to further research on Parvo. The Baker Institute at Cornell is looking deeper into the Parvo mutation, and whether the current vaccines can protect dogs against these new variants. At a higher level, this research will also help us understand more about canine immunity. And lastly, they are looking at what configuration of antibodies is the best to ultimately be a treatment, and whether these antibodies could be made in the lab.

We encourage you to join our efforts to tackle the Parvovirus by signing our Healthy Puppy Pledge at www.healthypuppymonth.com!

Transcript

Laura Reeves [0:40] Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I am your host, Laura Reeves, and I am very excited. We are announcing that April is officially Healthy Puppy Month! Love it. Good Dog has partnered with our friends at Revival Animal Health to support the Morris Animal Foundation and their Parvovirus research efforts specifically. Starting tomorrow, April 1st, you can visit healthypuppymonth.com to learn more about Parvovirus, hear stories from Parvo survivors, and join us in our mission to promote puppy health by signing the healthy puppy pledge. For every signature, Good Dog and Revival will each donate $1 to Morris Animal Foundation. You can find more information in the show notes. With that, I am very excited to introduce our guests today. We have Dr. Judi Stella, who is the Head of Health Standards, and Research here at Good Dog. We also have Kelly Diehl; she’s the Senior Director of Science and Communications at Morris Animal Foundation. So welcome, ladies. Kelly, I am super excited to have you on the show. I love the Morris Animal Foundation, and I want everyone to know about it. Tell us your story. Tell us the story of your organization that I think not nearly enough people know about. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [2:10] We’ve been around since 1948, so a long time. I think you’re right: a lot of people don’t know about us. We were started by a veterinarian, Dr. Mark Morris (hence the name) Sr. Dr. Morris was one of the first practitioners, for example, to actually do just small animals in the 1920s. He was very concerned about research that benefited animals for animal health. I think, as you can imagine, until recently, animals were used for research but that research did not necessarily benefit them at all. He felt like we needed to change this. So, he started the foundation and set up our endowment and created us as a research organization. Of course we started with dog and cat funding, but we moved to horses in 1959 and wildlife in 1967, so we have several funding buckets. 

Laura Reeves [3:10] See, I didn’t even know you did wildlife! That’s crazy! Very cool. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [3:13] Not necessarily conservation, but real wildlife health concerns that it’s super hard to get funding for. 

Laura Reeves [3:21] Absolutely. Give us an idea of some of the projects that you’re working on right now. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [3:25] We have a lot. Maybe we’ll start with some of the more unusual ones. We have several projects that we just funded in horse behavior, which is really cool. We’re doing some stuff with horse behavior—and including donkey pain. So, looking at pain in donkeys—just something I’m sure people would go, “Of course they probably have pain,” but we don’t know a lot about donkeys and how they manifest pain. We have some horse behavior, donkey studies. We’ve got a lot of studies looking at amphibians. I think a lot of people have heard of chytrid fungus, which is wiping out amphibian populations around the world. So we’ve actually got a big push, as you can imagine. That’s grant requests we get from a lot of folks who are looking at all different aspects: from looking at the fungus to—we have someone doing probiotics. You may wonder, “How do you give a frog probiotics?” You dip him in it. 

Laura Reeves [4:24] Oh my gosh! My frog went swimming in a probiotic! 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [4:25] Right, and then releasing them again. We also have some people trying to optimize conditions to raise endangered amphibians in captivity for potential release. That’s some of our interesting wildlife stuff. We’ve got some cat behavior studies going on, so again looking at cat behavior. We have lots of cancer studies. I think many people come to us because we’ve had a lot of cancer research—both dog and cat—for a number of years. We have several cancer studies: one looking at immunotherapy. You mentioned the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study; that’s the only study we’re funding in-house. It’s a cancer risk study, and we can talk about that later. We’ve got a huge portfolio with a lot of different pieces moving here. 

Laura Reeves [5:12] Yes! I just think it is really amazing. The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, to me, is just—someone mentioned it on one of my other podcast interviews, and I had never heard of it. I just think it’s fabulous. Can you give people just like this much, and then I want to talk about the one that is specific to what we’re working on, which is the Parvo Research Study? 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [5:35] Absolutely. So, in a nutshell, the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (as I mentioned) was conceived of as a cancer risk study. Goldens, unfortunately, have a high incidence of cancer as a breed. We knew that. And they’re a very popular breed. So we knew we could get enough dogs. We enrolled 3,044 Golden Retrievers between the age of 6 and about 2 years of age. The study started in 2012. We are 9 years into this. We’ve only lost about 300 dogs, and that’s unfortunately through death and attrition. As you can imagine, these dogs are entering middle age, and we’re losing a lot to cancer. We’re watching all that very, very closely. The owners and the veterinarians who care for the pet every year fill out this extensive questionnaire (well over 100 pages of questions). 

Laura Reeves [6:26] A hundred pages?! 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [6:27] A hundred pages. That’s not just one question; I mean, it’s a lot. Plus, we collect blood, feces, hair, nails, and urine every year and bank these samples. By the time we’re done, we figure we’ll have at least 5 million data points that include answers to questions, plus biological samples. It’s a $32 million study by the time we’re done. And we are funding it. We fund it mostly through private donations. It’s a heavy lift, but the idea is once we get through the other end, we will have really good data on how these dogs live their lives. We don’t intervene. We just ask questions, and they live their life. We’re hoping to be able to identify (like I said) cancer risk factors, but we don’t look at just cancer. We look at everything. Every disease that you can imagine. These samples and data are available to researchers. 

Laura Reeves [7:22] Unbelievably cool. Judi, you had some questions for Kelly about the Parvo Research Study that they’re working on, which I think is also very interesting. 

Dr. Judi Stella [7:31] Yeah, so as we stated at the outset, we are excited to be part of Happy Puppy Month and to be involved in this and promoting that, of course. One of the things that we’re focusing on is Parvovirus. So, Kelly, most people understand Parvovirus and know what it is, but in case anybody doesn’t know what it is, can you give us just why that’s so important to helping puppies? 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [7:52] Absolutely! Interestingly, the Foundation has a long history with funding Parvovirus research. Way back when this horrible disease first cropped up in 1978, Parvoviruses had been around. The misnamed feline distemper virus. It’s actually a Parvovirus. It has nothing to do with canine distemper. Probably people think Canine Parvovirus—the bad guy that caused disease evolved actually from Feline Parvovirus. This horrible disease comes up. People at Cornell (who we’re working with in the new study we’re funding; it’s come full circle) at the Baker Institute were kind of one of the premiere places looking at viruses in dogs. As I’ve talked to some of their researchers there who have been there since 1978, they said, “We would get samples from all over the country of dead dog tissue—going, ‘Tell us what happened!’” They looked for funding, and Morris was one of their funders at that point, just pouring money into them to try to figure out what this disease was. We funded them for several years. Canine Parvovirus is a Parvovirus—Parvo meaning small. There are lots of Parvoviruses, and they’re very species-specific. Parvovirus really likes to grow in rabidly dividing cells. Where do you have a lot of them? In your GI tract. Which is why we see signs like vomiting and that horrible bloody, stinky diarrhea that they have. It just attacks all these cells that are trying to grow, and the Parvovirus is there. It also affects bone marrow, which is another rapidly dividing cell tissue, which is why we see low white counts. I mean, that’s how we diagnose it a lot. These puppies, young dogs, come in. They’ve got horrible, bloody diarrhea which has a particular smell. Sorry—grossing people out!

Laura Reeves [9:42] Anyone who has ever smelled Parvo (I have) will never, ever, ever forget it. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [9:50] Right. So you see that, and you couple with it a low white count and you probably have the diagnosis, even though there are a bunch of tests out there to confirm. That’s Parvovirus kind of in a nutshell. The good news was vaccines followed pretty quickly. As soon as they knew it was a virus and could identify it, vaccines were developed. Some of our funding went to that. We were just giving like a pile of money over there. We were one of many. I mean, AKC was really involved in this push as well, back in the late ’70s into the early ’80s. On we go. Vaccines are good. We know that. I’m old enough to remember when Parvovirus first came out, I’ll be honest.

Laura Reeves [10:32] Same here.

Dr. Kelly Diehl [10:33] It was bad. People’s dogs, in our neighborhood, were dying.

Laura Reeves [10:39] We had puppies from Parvo litters. We were breeding dogs in the late ’70s, early ’80s. My family lived through hell.

Dr. Kelly Diehl [10:47] It was bad. Really bad. So we got vaccines, and they’ve been very good. However, it’s not like we don’t see Parvovirus, right? We still see it. Usually it’s unvaccinated puppies. It’s puppies in the middle of their series, sometimes. There have been floatings for a long time—as a veterinarian, you’d hear this buzz: Are the vaccines effective? Are we getting mutations? We definitely identified that this virus has mutated over time. Let’s face it: we all know about Covid and mutants and variants, right? I think people are really probably well-educated on that phenomena, and it just happens over time. The bottom line has been (and we’ve been very lucky) that our vaccines seem to be fine for these variants that have cropped up. But it still happens. And you’ll hear this buzz: Is there a vaccine break? Is the vaccine still effective? It’s been tweaked over time but not in a major way. It went through a couple of iterations in the ’80s and then kind of is the stuff we have now. The group in Cornell, our good friends who are still working on this—in fact, one of the co-PIs was a guy I interviewed. He was a postdoc when the first Parvo hit, and he’s now the head of the Baker Institute, so it’s nice to talk to Dr. Colin Parrish. He is mentoring; one of his high-level students is doing this particular study and what they’re looking at (and I think, again, Covid has given us the language to discuss this) variants. We’re talking a deep, deep, deep dive into looking at dogs who come in the clinic who are vaccinated. They’re looking at their antibodies to Parvovirus. They’re going to sift them out, find them, and actually look at Parvovirus variants. Let’s face it: they’ve been banking up for 40-some years. They’re going to look at what they have, and they’re going to look at these dogs just coming through the clinic (not sick dogs) who’ve been vaccinated, and they’re going to look at their serum and their antibodies and say, “What are these antibodies reacting to?” We are talking heavy, heavy-duty molecular biology, right down to subcellular level, to look at these molecules and say—and I think people know about Covid and the spike, right?— “But what is it on Parvovirus that these antibodies are reacting to? Is there cross-reactivity with all these variants they see? Maybe it’s better against this variant (the vaccine) than this variant.” They’re taking a really, really deep dive looking at this and looking at where does the protection come and are they seeing maybe some shifts (like, the dog’s not sick but maybe the vaccine’s not quite hitting all the variants that they can identify). Things drift over time, so that’s kind of really high-level. I’ve read this grant a lot and—trust me—the molecular biology boggles my mind. But that’s it, in a nutshell. They really go in to look at the molecules, the antibody molecules, and see which ones work the best. Do they have cross-reactivity? It’s the biggest study in Parvo we’ve funded in quite a while, and it’s really taking a close look at these variants. I think the ultimate goal of this is a couple-fold: One is can we make a better vaccine? Is our vaccine actually okay? Are we going to see breaks? Are things mutating and maybe we’re just getting lucky and not seeing a lot of disease? That would be one thing, to look at the vaccine efficacy. The other thing that they’re doing is it actually is a model to understand canine immunity from a higher level, looking at model systems. They’re hoping to answer some questions about how the immune system works in the dog, using Parvo as a model. So, some about the efficacy of the vaccine and some about how dogs' immune systems work. The third (which is kind of intriguing) is, again, people know about neutralizing antibodies, right? People who have recovered—can we use their serum to treat? They’re looking. Maybe we can figure out what configuration of antibodies is the best; could that ultimately be a treatment because it’s from dogs? Or can we make—and this is really science-fiction—a sci-fi sort of off-the-shelf product that you could give a dog, a puppy, and really help them out? Because what do we do now?

Laura Reeves [15:34] Tamiflu is about all that I’ve heard that was useful. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [15:40] Well, yes, in some instances, though it’s never panned out as being great. What we do now is we support these dogs because they’re losing massive amounts of fluids. What do we treat these guys with? Fluids. We give them antibiotics because everybody knows about the gut microbiome, too. We are not alone! If their intestinal barrier isn’t good because the cells are just sloughing off as fast as they can be formed, the bacteria can get into the bloodstream and people have probably heard of something called sepsis, which is bacteria everywhere and you’ve got no white cells because—guess what—Parvo’s knocking those out, too. We support them with antibiotics. We’ve had a lot of stuff come and go: plasma—maybe plasma’s good. Sometimes we use that. Antibiotics, obviously. There’s fecal transplants now, kind of out there. Might be good. But all kinds of things. It’s expensive. These guys spend a lot of days in the hospital. 

Laura Reeves [16:41] And poor outcome, almost no matter what.

Dr. Kelly Diehl [16:42] Right. If we had maybe an off-the-shelf product that worked a little faster, that would be great. I think this study has a lot of moving parts, but it could answer a lot of questions—specifically for Parvovirus, both about the dog immune system, and finally the sort of pie-in-the-sky that may be an antibody product that would work to treat these guys. 

Laura Reeves [17:13] Judi, this partnership that Good Dog has with Revival Animal Health to help fund this amazing work—talk to us a little about that.

Dr. Judi Stella [17:22] We partnered with Revival because we just want to get the word out there that this is such an important thing that we really need to do all that we can for, to protect our puppies while they’re going through that transition from when maternal antibodies are wearing off to when they’re fully vaccinated. We are working with Revival to get the word out. We want to have everybody join us in our pledge to do all that we can to make sure that we have healthy puppies and that we raise them to be behaviorally, physically, emotionally healthy. Part of what we’re doing at Good Dog is getting the word out, talking to Kelly and having podcasts like this. We’re also going to have some educational materials for breeders to give to puppy owners so that, again, it can be this holistic kind of thing where the breeders have to do their part and the puppy owners have to follow through and do their part. So we want to get all this information out there. Look for more of that to come on the Good Dog side of things! We’ll be on social media and working with Revival and Morris to get the word out. 

Laura Reeves [18:23] Excellent. Kelly, I think one of the most amazing things about what you were just talking about is the potential—what Judi just said—to impact the long-term health and safety of all of our puppies, both as breeders and as puppy owners.

Dr. Kelly Diehl [18:40] Absolutely. I think this study, again, is really exciting from several different points. It’s getting underway. It’s obviously a good group. A little lesser side benefit (but something that’s important to Morris) is this is a fellowship grant. So, this is training a future researcher as well, which we know in veterinary medicine: there’s a real lack of people, unfortunately, going into veterinary research. That’s another little side benefit. It fires on a lot of different cylinders, which makes us happy. 

Laura Reeves [19:15] You know, when you get that win-win and then it’s win-win-win-win-win, that’s a huge bonus. I’m very excited to follow this. I’m thrilled for Morris Animal Foundation to be involved in this, and I am very happy to see Good Dog and Revival Animal Health joining forces, putting together an opportunity. So, all of y’all, sign up! We’re going to have the website where you can sign up, and everybody that signs up at healthypuppymonth.com—for every signature, Good Dog and Revival will each donate $1 to the Morris Animal Health Foundation, and that goes a long way to making everybody’s life better. 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [19:58] Absolutely. We really appreciate the funding. Like I said, this project (for example) is an $100,000 project, and that’s our average cost for every study that we fund because that’s just the way it is. 

Laura Reeves [20:11] So we need 50,000 signatures! Chop, chop, people! 

Dr. Kelly Diehl [20:14] It would be great. Everything helps. That’s what I would want people to know. Everything helps that we get. What is nice is I mentioned our endowment before, and what that does is it pays a lot of our administrative costs at the foundation and pays salaries. That way, we can put donations to fund studies. 

Laura Reeves [20:37] Excellent. Well, thank you so much, ladies. Very much appreciate your time! Judi, thank you for joining us. Kelly, thank you for sharing information about your fabulous, fabulous organization. And I need 50,000 signatures, people! Get on it!