Health Testing and Dog Breeding: An Expert Panel Weighs In

Watch our expert panel from the Health Symposium, featuring Dr. Gayle Watkins, Dr. Kari Ekenstedt, Dr. Marty Greer, and Dr. Elizabeth Lutz.

If you liked this panel discussion, you can find all of the Health Symposium videos here!

Transcript

Mikel Delgado [0:03] Hi, everybody! Welcome back. Hopefully you can see us? We’re all here. I’m Dr. Mikel Delgado. I’m the Standards and Research Lead here at Good Dog. I’m going to be moderating our panel today. I want to first thank you all for sticking around. I think you’re going to find this panel to be fascinating. We’ve got a really nice group of experts here. You are familiar with Dr. Ekenstedt, if you saw her earlier. We all just heard from Dr. Marty Greer. I’d like to introduce our new speakers. We’ve got Dr. Gayle Watkins, who is an AKC Breeder of Merit. She is a long-time breeder of Golden Retrievers, and has more knowledge about Golden Retrievers in her pinky nail than I ever dream of having. She is the founder of Avidog University and now she is Good Dog’s Head of Education. We’re very fortunate to have her, both at Good Dog and here today. And Dr. Elizabeth Lutz is a board-certificated veterinary ophthalmologist. She completed her residency in comparative ophthalmology at Ohio State University. Now she’s a clinician at I Care For Animals in Pennsylvania. So, both of you, welcome. Thank you. I would like to start off with a couple of broad questions. I might direct them to one of you, and then any of you are welcome to comment. Maybe raise your hand if you want to make a comment. We’ll try to make this flow as nicely as possible. I thought it’d be nice to start, Gayle, with you because you are a breeder. You have a lot of experience with breeding. I know you’ve applied a lot of tools to your breeding program. I know you’ve used Better Bred. I know you’ve really actively used COIs as a tool to make breeding decisions, so I would love to hear your perspective on how your approach has changed over the years and what you would recommend to newer breeders. 

Gayle Watkins [1:59] Great question, Mikel. What an amazing day we’ve had! Congratulations on every minute of it. So, I’ve been breeding for over 40 years and, as Mikel said, I breed Golden Retrievers. When I first started, we did 2 genetic tests. We did OFA hips and we did eye exams. Eye exams had come in pretty recently at that point in time. Today, I’m not sure I could actually count how many tests we use. So this idea of constant education and keeping your pulse on what’s happening in your breed or breeds, I think, is really important. Good Dog is doing a great job helping you do that, putting on events like this. Our Facebook group. Go in and ask for information. The other thing I wanted to say was that it can be scary to do these genetic tests. I understand that, and I understand we love our dogs, and we might not be able to breed them, even though we purchased them 2 years ago. The comment that Dr. Greer made about temperament I think goes with breeders, too. We have to be phenomenally resilient human beings that can get some bad news and process it and then figure out a plan and move forward with our breeding program. Sometimes there are setbacks. I’ve probably had 5 major setbacks in my breeding career, diseases I had never heard of before that weren’t identified in my breed. I’ve regrouped. I took a little time off. I regrouped, and I started again. I’m going to do one last thing, Mikel. I know we want to get to everybody else, but I want to put a huge plug-in for PennHIP. I just PennHIP’ed my youngest girl, and she’s right near .3. She’s a Golden Retriever, and Dr. Smith said how few Golden Retrievers are in the .3 range. I started that breeding line with an OFA fair bitch whose father failed hips. Today, we’re at 26% OFA excellence, and the vast majority of our dogs are right around .3. What did I use? I used PennHIP to do it. It’s a phenomenal, valuable tool. I could probably go on for another hour, but I will be quiet. 

MD [4:41] Great! I’m sure we’ll have more questions for you later. Dr. Lutz, on that same note, if you were talking to a new breeder, what do you think they need to know about eye testing? I assume, as an ophthalmologist, you see a lot of eye issues and have some thoughts. 

Elisabeth Lutz [4:57] Yeah, we do. Every breed is a little bit different, and I think that the most important information that we would give to any breeder—a new breeder or an experienced breeder—is to have a good connection with an ophthalmologist in the area. We recommend OFA exams for any purebred dog, certainly any purebred dog that is going to be involved in a breeding program. We recommend those annually. We’ll provide those in an office setting, not just at a puppy clinic, which is how everybody is used to experiencing those. But you can have those at an office as well. What most people are not aware of necessarily is that the same information that we use as opthamologists to screen any purebred dog (puppy or otherwise) who comes in for an OFA exam is available to the public in an online digital format nowadays. There’s something called the OFA Blue Book, which anybody can search online. I know for myself and a number of my colleagues, when a breeder or even an owner comes in to my office for an OFA exam, this is different from a puppy clinic. Those appointments move a lot faster. I always try to print out for a client (a breeder, an owner) the breed statistics, what we’re screening for in your dog at that moment, and what the most current statistics in the OFA Blue Book are that are available. I think it’s important, when you have a breeding program or when you have a dog who you’re going to be using for showing, breeding, agility, whatever that dog’s job might be, as a conscientious breeder or an owner, you have some understanding about what we’re looking for in those exams and what you might be looking for at home. Because, just like Dr. Greer even touched on in the last few minutes, it’s not just what we’re seeing as an ophthalmologist at that moment, but it’s what might develop over time. It’s not just what we see in the eyes, but everywhere else in the body. From the standpoint of a veterinarian, yes, we’re always looking for something in that moment during an exam, during an OFA exam, in any part of the body that we’re examining, but from a genetic standpoint, we also are looking for things or being mindful of things that could develop over time. From the standpoint of a breeder or an owner who’s being conscientious, a lot of the information we have in our mind, you can find for yourself online as well. The OFA Blue Book is a good resource that you can print out or search for yourself, bring to your primary care veterinarian or to a specialist that you would visit in the future. 

MD [7:51] Great. Thank you so much! So, Dr. Ekenstedt, you spoke to the process of how tests get from an idea to the lab to being a commercial product for the public. I think we get questions like: Why isn’t there a test for X, Y, Z, so I hope your talk gave people a little bit of insight, but what do you have to say about the future of genetics from a breeder perspective? Do you see this going in the direction of personalized medicine or what’s next for dog breeders as far as genetic testing is concerned?

Kari Ekenstedt [8:23] That’s a really great question. I am—disclaimer!—not a prophet, so I can’t predict perfectly, but I do think we’re seeing that in humans too, right? That we can do more and more personalized medicine with the genetic testing capabilities that we have and with how quickly so much genetic information can be accumulated on a single individual. Yes, I do think dog genetics is moving towards more personalized medicine. I don’t know if it will get applied exactly the same way it has been or will be in people. I think the cost-benefit ratios are going to have to be analyzed. In humans, someday I suppose we’ll all have all of our genetics typed up when we’re born. And then we’ll know exactly some of the things that’ll be in our futures and can tailor our life decisions around it. It’s still pretty expensive to sequence a whole genome. Those markers I talked about can be helpful, but they’re never perfect. Markers can always be recombined, so markers are not ever going to be a perfect way to predict every individual’s future. Even though whole genome sequencing is way less expensive than it used to be, it’s still pretty pricey. The bigger problem is just the data analysis. Some of the big testing companies in humans like 23 & Me and Ancestry—they provide some pretty good data-type analysis that you can access online if you’ve done those tests on yourself. The dog genetic endeavors are getting closer to that. Certainly some of the bigger commercial companies are providing more and more of that, like interactive tools. I feel like my grad student comes in here every other week with some sort of new thing that has shown up on her 23 & Me: “I’m susceptible to blah blah blah!” Some new thing she didn’t know. I think we’re going to get there. I think in veterinary medicine, because of the differences in insurance and all of that, it may never quite get adopted on the same scale as it will in humans, but who knows?

MD [10:50] The future is unknown! So, Dr. Greer and Dr. Watkins, maybe you can speak to this question, which is: When is it a good time to retire a breeding female and male?

Marty Greer [11:05] Do you want to answer? 

GW [11:07] After you.

MG [11:08] I don’t think there needs to be a time you need to retire a breeding male. I did talk to someone earlier today who said that there are recommendations, but that’s more from a public perspective/pressure than it is from anything. But I like my old male dogs. If they can still … manage to produce sperm and get their breedings done, go for it! That speaks well for longevity. I’m a big fan of longevity. Females, I don’t like to see a female bred for the first time after age 6. I don’t like to see her bred after age 8 in most cases, but we do see performance dogs in our practice that have been fit and trained and have had a career. Some of those females may be fit enough and fertile enough to still breed at age 10. But that’s pushing it! Typically age 8 is about as late as I’d like to go. I think they should have bloodwork ahead of time to make sure that everything looks okay. We do see a decline in fertility of about 33% after age 6. So those people that have pushed their dogs for careers, whether it’s in the show ring or performance events, are kind of flirting with infertility issues when they get them off the track of what they’ve been doing and want to bring them home for  a whelping. I like to breed females younger, because we see better fertility, better whelpings, easier whelpings, easier raising of puppies, but there’s a lot of questions with that. But if my boys can keep going, man, go for it.

MD [12:43] Gayle, do you have anything to add?

GW [12:45] I have very similar thoughts. I think in particular with breeding males, in breeds that need longevity (Berners, Goldens, Flat-Coats), where we really need to be pursuing longevity. Frankly, I think it needs to be a priority for every breed and every breeder because there’s never enough time with them, ever. We know in human beings and in birds and other species that older sperm has longer telomeres, which is the very end of the chromosomes. The male has a more direct contribution (or a more powerful contribution). So using older males has been foundational in my breeding program. I bred a 8.5-year-old bitch to a 13-year-old stud dog naturally and had 9 puppies, and every single one of those puppies lived to 11.5. They haven’t all passed yet, but in Golden Retrievers, to get an entire litter that far is exceptional, or at least in the ones that I know. Retiring bitches, one of the things that I have written about that I resist in some ways is this “breed them back to back to back then spay them” because we lose information when we do that. When we’re choosing the next sire for a litter, it is really helpful to know what the bitch produced prior to that. What are the adult temperaments in her puppies? What is the adult health? That’s 2 years in most breeds. If she’s done breeding by 4, you aren’t going to have much information. We tend to try and breed our bitches early. They are almost all performance dogs, so we have got to balance that. But then we’ll breed them later if we have the right set of genetics—the male that is the right match and we have information on her offspring. We have some late onset diseases in Golden Retrievers that we have no genetic tests for and are very challenging. I want that information that at 5 or 6 this dog doesn’t have pigmentary uveitis. It’s a healthy dog. It doesn’t have early onset cancer. I completely agree with Dr. Greer that 10 would definitely be pushing my comfort level. I can’t even tell you why because I don’t think there’s any research except you’re not going to get as many puppies and you may have to do a C-section. But 8 or 9, I’m comfortable with that for extraordinary bitches so that I can have feedback on her kids. 

MD [15:47] Great, thanks! Dr. Lutz, we got a question about cataracts. Someone wrote in: “I had an English Cocker diagnosed with cataracts at 2 years of age. Both parents were cerfed and are normal. Can you explain why this might have occurred? 

EL [16:06] I think that’s a common question that we get, not just in English Cocker Spaniels but across any breed of dog. Part of my follow-up question really would have to be where those cataracts were inside of the lens because there are cataracts that affect certain parts of the lens that are congenital in nature, like what Dr. Greer mentioned. Congenital cataracts are, like we said, not necessarily genetic but can be genetic in nature. And then there are other types of cataracts that are inherited in nature. Cataracts are very often in what we call autosomal recessive traits. What that means is that both parents can be OFA-ed or, previous to OFA, the OFA exam was called a cerf exam. Clinically, the parents can appear normal (so neither parent can have a cataract clinically) but their genetics can both carry the gene, so the bitch and the sire can both carry the genetic material to produce puppies with a cataract. You only need a dog with one copy of a gene to breed with a dog with another copy of a gene to make a dog with a cataract. If your dog has a cataract, that means that that dog potentially received 2 abnormal copies of a gene, so that means that mother dog and father dog would potentially only each have had 1 abnormal copy of a gene and may not either one of them had a cataract at the time they had an exam or ever have had a cataract in their life. The unusual thing is (and this is why we recommend cerf exams or what are now called OFA exams annually) even dogs who we know should need both copies of their gene to be abnormal, to make a cataract, even some of those dogs will make cataracts with even one abnormal copy of the gene. So that may not develop until later on in life. Sometimes those are not genetic in nature. Sometimes those cataracts are age-related in nature. I’m presuming that the dog we’re talking about in question didn’t have genetic cataracts, and that would be why that mom and dad both had abnormal genes to pass on. That could be why that happened. But clinically mom and dad can be normal, and the baby is not. That’s why we recommend OFA exams or cerf exams for everybody, not just parents but also litters. And not just during puppyhood but annually because even when dogs are cerfed or OFAd at 12 weeks of age—which is good conscientious breeding habits—there may be no cataracts. Those cataracts, if they are to develop, may not develop until 1, 2, 4, sometimes 5 years of age. 

MD [19:26] On a similar note, Dr. Ekenstedt, we had a lot of questions from your talk and we were tight on time, so we didn’t get to address those during your talk but we did get a question that’s kind of similar, which is just: What about dogs who, by genetic tests, are affected by EIC but they never collapse? Is this a multiple gene thing or what’s going on with those dogs?

KE [19:48] We’re not sure. It depends on the breed. In Labradors and Chesapeake Bay Retrievers and Curly Coated Retrievers, we can definitively say that the published mutation in a homozygous (having 2 copies of that) absolutely puts the dog at risk of collapse—without doubt. And then it’s kind of an excitement threshold, so for example, the affected rate was kind of shockingly high amongst the show Labradors, but they were much less likely to have collapse. They might be genetically affected, but they never express the phenotype, meaning they never actually have a collapse episode. This is presumably because they’re just more relaxed dogs, and they don’t have that high, strenuous exercise lifestyle that would actually precipitate the collapse. Their Dynamin 1 protein is dysfunction, but they never get hot enough to actually move into that temperature-sensitive threshold where it becomes an issue. In other breeds, all bets are off. If you have a homozygous affected Corgi, I don’t know if that predisposes them to collapse or not because nobody’s actually studied it and published on it. Certainly, we know that allele is out there in a lot of other breeds and my guess is if there were other breeds that had that allele and were experiencing a lot of collapse, we would have known about it and probably eventually would have—I’m not at Minnesota anymore, but if they had it coming in and could show that there was a statistical relationship between this genetic test and the phenotype that they were seeing (this collapse in that breed), that could be published and then validated through a scientific peer review process. But for right now, that’s a bit unknown. I mentioned the Old English Sheepdogs. I haven’t heard of a single OES that had a collapse episode, even if they were genetically affected. It could just be that they’re such chill dogs that they never reach that threshold of temperature or whatever within their muscles that causes that collapse.

MD [22:00] I feel like I would be not the English Sheepdog. I feel like I would be the kind that is collapsing. Super interesting! Dr. Greer, I wanted to ask you about the canine semen bank that you run in Wisconsin. Basically, can you just talk about how breeders can incorporate this? Do you test the semen? You know these dogs’ genetics for matching purposes? Is that something that breeders could benefit from? 

MG [22:33] The semen belongs to the dog owner, not to us. So it’s up to the owner on whether they want to do any testing. Of course, if we didn’t have blood stored on the FTA card, then the only way we could test is either the dog is still alive or if we sacrificed some semen. So, that’s kind of the story on that. Moving forward, like I said, the AKC is developing a toolkit so that breed clubs like the Otterhounds (pioneers in this!) can start to own semens on dogs so that prior to the time that people decide to destroy their semen because of nonpayment or because of death or they’re no longer breeding or whatever, we’re going to start to see this large volume of semen (hopefully) not be destroyed and move forward into semen banks that can be used for long-term use going down the road. People can go dip that deeply into genetics. If we have, for instance, a mutation that comes along and it affects 60% of the dogs in a particular breed, we can go back to semen that predated that genetic defect. There’s a lot there. But the semen belongs to the people who own it for now, but eventually to probably breed clubs and other organizations that will be able to use that DNA for different testing. 

MD [23:54] Cool, thanks. So, one thing that’s come up several times today (and I’m a big fan of repetition because usually people have questions for a reason and these topics come up multiple times): I think it’s the balance between removing dogs from a breeding program because they are a carrier or affected by a condition (and obviously some of those conditions are serious enough that you should make that decision) but can you give some advice (all of you) to breeders on how to balance health testing and thinking that maybe they should remove dogs from their breeding pool versus the maintenance of genetic diversity within the breed? I’ll start with Dr. Watkins.

GW [24:35] I deal with this question from breeders all the time. It is not an easy thing to think about. I find that especially new-ish breeders will end up with say, a puppy with a birth defect, and they immediately want to throw out the sire and dam without really understanding what might have caused it— whether it was environmental, do we know if it’s inherited? Dr. Greer gave us her green, yellow, red. I use George Padgett’s Control of Canine Genetic Diseases. It’s an old book, so you don’t want to use it for your breed test, but he has a 9-point hierarchy of what he called disagreeability. He starts with the fatal diseases, the ones that cause pain, and then he works down to problems that are just cosmetic and have no impact on the dog or its owner. I use that regularly and pretty religiously as I’m faced with a new problem and trying to make sense of should I continue to breed this dog that produced it and what might be my plan? Usually it’s going to be to go to a clear line, drop your COIs, really pay attention to line breeding. I don’t call it prioritizing. I call it weighting issues. We can never say, “Do I breed for temperament or do I breed for health or do I breed for longevity?” There isn’t a good answer to that except for “yes.” How we juggle those things is important. I want to say one more thing, Mikel, about understanding the standards for your breed. We talk about the Blue Book, which is another bible, just wonderful for eye diseases. But Good Dog has done a ton of work for you on this. So if you’re feeling completely overwhelmed today, go to the Good Dog Health Standards for your breed or breed combination and use those good, great, and excellent standards to guide you. And then I’ll put the plug in for aspiring to get an excellent, to do the tests that are needed for your breed. (Sorry, I know I sort of went rambling!)

MD [27:17] No, that’s great! Good reminder to everybody. Dr. Lutz, as a clinician, you might be face-to-face with a breeder who’s just tested their dog and guiding them or advising them on some of these decisions. Can you speak to that? 

EL [27:30] I think that I would give the same advice that Dr. Watkins and Dr. Greer just gave. Even when we are (or I am) making decisions, medically, from an OFA standpoint, there are certainly things that we recommend medically: no longer using animals because we know that it will cause pain or, from my standpoint, loss of sight. We kind of always look at things from the same standpoint that Dr. Greer shared and, essentially, what Dr. Watkins just said: Are these conditions that will be life-limiting or quality-of-life-limiting to an animal as it moves through its life? If the answer is yes, and it has the potential to produce that type of life-limiting condition or quality-of-life-limiting condition for puppies, future generations moving forward, that’s the type of breeding program that we’re hoping to encourage the breeder to continue moving away from those sorts of conditions. If it’s something that’s more cosmetic in nature, those are the things that we consider a breeder’s option to continue to use. We don’t encourage (at least in our college of ophthalmology) breeders to remove dogs who have these breeder-option conditions like distichia (for instance) which are extra eyelashes. Even some eyelid abnormalities in different breeds of dogs. There are a lot of things that are breeder options. We don’t recommend removing or culling or pulling a dog from a line for those things, because we know that those are dogs who will have almost always normal quality of life and, often, good temperament, good longevity. So I think it’s normal to think about all those things in conjunction. I think that everything that everybody else already said—genetic testing will become helpful as it becomes more accurate because that gives us another piece to the puzzle. The most important thing is trying to balance what is good health for the dog or the dogs that we’re looking at, and what is their temperament? What is their longevity or the longevity of the sire and the dam that we’re dealing with at the same time? I think essentially we deal with 2 populations of people. We deal with ultra-responsible people who want to have the most perfect lines that they can and are willing to remove anybody who’s abnormal, and that can create a real lack of diversity with a breeding line—and none of us really want to see that happen—and then we have kind of a second population of people sometimes, as veterinarians, who don’t really want to remove anybody from a breeding line. I and we really want to work for that sweet spot in the middle, understanding who really should be a good pet and maybe not make babies in the future? Who is still a good, valuable genetic contribution to a line? I think we really just need to be conscientious of what is a critical medical or genetic issue that maybe shouldn’t contribute to the overall genetic population moving forward and what can still move forward? 

MD [31:03] Great. Dr. Greer, I want to shift just a tiny bit for you because when you gave your talk, when you started talking about 5% COI, the comments started lighting up. You did get a few people saying, “We have a closed gene pool. We have big issues, the Leonberger breed—very few dogs with less than 5%. Many breeds have a genetic COI of 20%+ throughout the breed, so how can they stay at or under 5%? Can you speak to that issue just a little bit more? 

MG [31:35] The COI is kind of an interesting and complicated topic, but really all you can do is the best you can do with the number of genes that you have. You can certainly look outside your own group. Like I said, you can look in other countries and ship semen or ship dogs. There’s just really limited ways you can improve that. But the Dandie Dinmont study was really interesting, so if people are looking at that, they were able to keep breed type, keep competitive show dogs, but improve their genetic diversity by using some of the matchmaker programs where they use dogs that were genetically as diverse as possible so that they could improve that. There are techniques that can be out there, but I don’t think there’s a really quick and easy answer. It may involve some expense. It may involve testing. It may involve importing. You may go to people that you never thought you would go to. There are people out there with good dogs that may be commercial breeders, and you may not want to work with them, you may not want to do that, but they have genetic diversity, too. So we should not be elitist in the decision-making that we’re making when we need to improve our genetics. We need to be forward-thinking and open-minded about options that we have, other than being so open-minded that we want to breed mixed-breed dogs. If your breed plan is to say as a purebred dog breeder, you need to stay purebred—unless you have very specific input. There was a Dalmation studied with English Setters to try and reduce the incidence of bladder stones. Those are very controlled situations. That’s the only time that you’d want to try to change a purebred dog into something that isn’t a purebred dog. There are choices out there. They might not always be the most popular ones, but you can come up with some good solutions. You really have to look at what’s most important for your breed, not necessarily what’s most important for your ego in making those decisions.

MD [33:39[ Thank you. Dr. Ekenstedt, you’re doing a lot of clinical research, and we did get a few questions about participating in research during your talk, and I know you kind of talked about how to find ethical studies and that sort of thing, but we also have a huge audience at Good Dog of people with purebred dogs who might be valuable research participants to help advance our knowledge, so how can they get involved? What would you recommend that someone with a dog does if they want to advance science?

KE [34:09] Great question! There are some efforts, nationally (at least in the US, so this isn’t going to be the simple answer outside the US and maybe Canada), but the AKC does have the CHIC database. Canine Health Information Center. If you just Google AKC and CHIC, you’ll find it. Every dog that’s purebred and in AKC can be banked in CHIC. There are options for submitting. You can submit a cheek swab. You can submit a blood sample. And then if you do specific types of testing, those results can get sent to CHIC, and they will get linked to your dog’s profile in there. Let’s say you submitted a blood sample to CHIC so your dog is banked, and then later on, you sent a sample off somewhere—I know at least at the U of M, they do this—for EIC testing. Your dog came back homozygous normal, so 2 copies of normal. That can get sent to CHIC through that mechanism. It costs a little bit extra. And then that result is publicly available. So there are some great ways to both bank samples but also to make results publicly available. I do believe that if a dog is affected with anything (not just EIC), I’m pretty sure CHIC allows you to post that for free. They’re sort of taking away one of the extra hurdles for you to be honest about what’s going on in your lines. I think, as I said before, transparency is really the only way to solve some of the health problems that we see in dogs. That’s a great way to do it. I, as a researcher, have used CHIC myself. There have been times when we’ve wanted to validate a mutation in a bigger population of dogs, so we’ll reach out to CHIC, and you have to fill out some forms, and you’ll say, “We really need a random sample,” because the samples that come to us for a specific study are almost always biased. We’re going to get all the cases, so the affected rate is going to look too high because we get all the affected, or we get a lot of them. So we might reach out to CHIC and say, “We want to look for something in this breed. Can you just give us 100 dogs, random?” And that can sometimes be helpful for those sorts of things. The other thing that’s really crucial, though, if you’re banking DNA anywhere is the health information that goes with it. If you send a sample from your 4-month-old Coton to CHIC, that’s great. But 5 years from now, that sample is really only just a Coton. We don’t have any other health information with it unless you update it to let us know: how did that dog do? Oh, that dog ended up with Legg Calve Perthes and had to have their femur amputated? Okay, that’s a no! But otherwise, it’s just a breed. It might be helpful for a breed population study, like I just mentioned, but it’s more helpful if you could keep updating that health information. Like I said in my talk, any sample is really only as valuable as its phenotype. What health information comes with it? Updating is really important. If I can be selfish and talk about my own research program, we never turn samples down. We do not have active projects on every single breed because I am not Superwoman like that. There are too many breeds out there! But we never turn samples down. And once a blood sample or a cheek swab sample has the DNA extracted, it goes into the deep freeze, in the -80, and it can be in there for… Some researcher the next generation after me can still use it, and the one after that. The DNA can stay like that forever and get used in 50 years or 100 years. In that regard, we would be happy to take samples. People can just look in Purdue and type in my name, and you can find my email address if you’re interested, and I’ll send you some forms. Of course, there is paperwork. To make it all legal! 

MD [38:21] Of course, of course. Just to give a shoutout: Good Dog does have a page on our website now listing current clinical trials, so that got dropped into the comments earlier. We’re trying to promote science and research and encourage breeders to participate if their dog qualifies. Everything from healthy dogs to affected dogs that researchers around the country need help with. Check that out! Dr. Lutz, can you speak to anything going on with stem cell therapy issues for dogs? Is that anything that people should be aware of? 

EL [38:54] Not the way that there is in orthopedics. I am sad to say the closest thing that we have going on with stem cell therapy—there are some medical products using stem cell therapy, which is not what people are asking about here. The closest projects are clinical trials that we have that are going on with stem cell research are out of 2 different institutions: the University of Pennsylvania with Gus Aguirre who probably many people listening to this talk are familiar with. Still has some more molecular research-based projects, but potentially there’s always some potential. I think there’s one researcher there who does some clinical research with some retinal stem cell trials. I don’t think any are currently active now, but the University of Pennsylvania might have some. The University of Michigan State has somebody from UPenn who moved to Michigan State, so they may actually have some of that retinal research there, but there’s nothing active for enrollment. There are some retinal projects I know in process, but nothing where you could enroll your dog for retinal stem cell therapy yet. It’s on the horizon! It’s coming! But not yet. 

MD [40:30] Great. Does anyone else want to add? Are there other stem cell therapies that people should be aware of or nope? Okay! Well, we are at 5:15 if you’re on the East Coast, 2:15 if you’re hanging out with me on the West Coast. We have gone beyond our expected time. I really appreciate you all staying late and plugging through. We had some technical difficulties earlier, and we prevailed, and here we are! But I also really want to respect everybody’s time, get you out there to enjoy the rest of your weekend, so we’re going to wrap up the panel and just say thank you so much! I know that we would have enough questions to keep you here all weekend, and I apologize to all of the people in the audience who asked a question and we didn’t get to it. It’s just not possible to answer every single question, although we’d love to. We do keep track of your questions, and that helps us guide our future educational webinars and events, so when we see the same kinds of questions come up, we need to have a webinar on that! Even if we didn’t answer your question now, we will do our best to help you with those issues in the future. Just keep your eyes on what Good Dog is up to, and we will try to help you out. Thank you, Dr. Ekenstedt and thank you, Dr. Watkins! Thank you Dr. Lutz! Thank you so much, Dr. Greer! Have a great day. We really appreciate you being a part of it.