We explore the cutting-edge science of extending dog lifespan through innovative drug development with Loyal founder and CEO Celine Halioua, who shares the company's groundbreaking approach to canine longevity and health.
In Science News:
• Cold water immersion after exercise shows no benefits for women despite its popularity among fitness influencers
In Pet Science:
• Brachycephalic dog and cat breeds now resemble each other more than their wild ancestors due to selective breeding
Our Guest Speaks about:
• Loyal's first drug mimics the longevity benefits of caloric restriction without reducing appetite
• Large dog breeds age faster due to persistently high growth hormone levels that weren't naturally selected for
• Loyal is conducting the largest animal health study ever with 1,300 dogs to test longevity interventions
• The company hopes to bring their first longevity drug to market within a year
• The goal is to add at least one healthier year to dogs' lives while improving quality of life during aging
• Aging dogs develop many of the same diseases as aging humans, making them excellent models for longevity research
Loyal: https://loyal.com/
Our links:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello science enthusiasts.
I'm Jason Zukoski.
And I'm Chris Zukoski, we'rethe pet parents of Bunsen,
beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The science animals on social media.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
If you love science.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And you love pets.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
You've come to the right spot, so put on your
safety glasses and hold on toyour tail.
This is the Science Podcast.
Hello everybody and welcome tothe Science Podcast.
We hope you're happy andhealthy out there.
This is episode 14 of seasonseven.
As I mentioned in last week'sshow, Chris and I are in the
busiest time for us as teachersthe next.
(00:46):
Well, we've been through a busyweek, we've got another one or
two, we got the podcast out.
It's a really good show.
So I think we'll just get rightto it and cut down on the small
talk.
In science news we're going tobe looking at that cold water
dipping fad.
Is there any science behind it?
Maybe, maybe not.
(01:07):
And in pet science we'relooking at how the
brachycephalic dogs and thebrachycephalic cats are starting
to become more closelyresembling each other than their
wild counterparts.
Our guest is so interesting andso on point with what we care
about as a family science dogs,but also potentially extending
(01:31):
their lifespan.
And our guest is Celine Heliwa,who is the founder and CEO of
Loyal, and she's going to betalking to us about Loyal's
drugs that are in trial rightnow for uh, to increase the
longevity of dogs.
So fascinating.
All right, let's get to it.
There's no time like sciencetime this weekend Science news.
(01:55):
Chris, do you want to take acold dip in an icy lake ever.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Never.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
How about tomorrow?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Maybe someday.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You're not a fan of swimming in cold waters.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Absolutely not, Jason .
You, on the other hand, enjoyit.
But there was somethinginteresting.
When I went to Quebec and Idon't know what happened to me,
I went into cooler water and Idon't know what happened to me.
I went into cooler water and Istayed at a family's house Like
I was.
What's the word?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
for it.
You're billeted there almost.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, I was.
It was almost billeted at thishouse with this wonderful family
and they had a pool in thebackyard.
In Quebec Most people had apool in the area that I was at.
And she said, oh, every nightwe go for a dip in the pool.
And I said what?
And of course, because I was inQuebec, I thought let's try
(02:56):
anything.
And she said what she said ifyou move, it's good, but in
French c'est tout beau move it'sgood, but in French it's si tu
bous.
And so then I came home and wewent swimming in Waterton, which
is south here in southernAlberta, and I went into the
cold kind of river thing and youwere like who's this woman that
(03:17):
came back from Quebec?
You were shocked that I was inthe cold water.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You were fueled by wine and cheese.
You had superpowers from goingto Quebec for a little while.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, definitely fueled by the food there was
delicious and probablynutritious, but it was very good
.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And from my part, growing up where I have grown up
in Alberta, the water here likethere is no warm water in
Alberta, canada.
The lakes maybe warm up a bitby I don't know end of July,
start of August and we would goswimming in mountain lakes.
I love it.
I love swimming in mountainlakes.
(04:00):
You can't stay in there forhours at a time, but there's
nothing like it.
Anyways, that's where the studycomes in.
There has been a lot of I wantto say health and fitness
influencers or people wantingfolks to get in on the cold
water plunge for health.
(04:20):
Have you heard about this,chris?
Has this been on your radar?
It's been on mine.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's been on a little bit of my radar for sure where
there's potential healthbenefits for dunking in cold
water after you work out, orhaving a soak in hot water or
warm water helps you relax.
So there has been lots ofstudies done on men, but
unfortunately studies on womenare few and far between.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So that's where this study comes in.
They took 30 healthy women withan average age of 23.3 years.
There was an exercise protocol.
They had to do five sets of 20drop jumps from a 0.6 meter high
box.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Now, Jason, do you do drop jumps during your workouts
?
Your workouts sound very highintensity training.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, my Monday workouts.
I do conditioning to keep myold body that's getting decrepit
as in good a shape as I waswhen I was younger.
I do some jumping around, Iflip tires, I push this super
heavy sled thing.
There's like rope slams that Ido.
It's like all of thesedifferent exercises.
Yes, I do drop jumps.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
So jumping off of a box that is just over half a
meter in height, jumping off ofthe box onto the ground and then
explosively jumping back ontothe box, 20 times Five sets of
those, you've done that.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I'm not a great jumper, but yeah, I have done
that.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yes, oh, I can tell you right now.
If my trainer said let's dothese, I would say no, thank you
.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, that's a drop jump.
So five sets of them.
Anyways, they had to get thepeople to exercise because the
claim of cold water is it does abunch of good things for your
body.
After this exercise, one groupwas put into cold water.
The cold water was 10 degreesCelsius for 10 minutes.
That's chilly 10 degreesCelsius.
You're going to feel that whenyou get in there.
(06:24):
The other group was put in hotwater, so that's 40 degrees
Celsius for 10 minutes.
And then there was a controlgroup who'd got nothing.
Maybe they were just given amagazine.
They had to wander around.
Anyways, those were the threedifferent interventions.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And not only that there were the interventions,
but there was, it happened rightimmediately after the exercise,
those scary sounding jumps, andthen again two hours later.
So yeah, back into the colddrink you go.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
They took some measurements, obviously
measurements before,measurements after.
They looked at for musclestrength, so that was a maximal
voluntary contraction, sosqueezing as hard as you can,
how sore you were.
Of course that's subjectiveMuscle swelling.
So doing all those jumps maybeyour knee might be swelled a bit
(07:18):
.
And of course that's a claim ofcold water soaking, as it helps
with swelling, and abiochemical marker which looked
at serum creatine kinase levels.
So creatine of course is in alot of red meats.
You can take that to.
I guess there's some.
There's.
There is evidence that if youtake creatine it does help with
(07:38):
weightlifting.
So this is something to lookand see if you make more natural
creatine from the cold watersoak.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And they did these assessments, a baseline
assessment before all thatjumping and at 24, 48, and 72
hours post-exercises.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Not the biggest study group size, but the findings I
think are interesting in thatthere was no difference in
muscle strength, soreness,swelling or that creatine among
the three different groupssoaking in hot water, soaking in
cold water or doing absolutelynothing.
In fact both cold and hot waterdid not accelerate recovery at
(08:22):
all.
There was no difference betweenthat and the group that was the
control group.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
This study highlights the need for more
gender-specific researchexploring how does exercise
affect women.
But there are somepsychological considerations
from this study.
Psychological benefits were notobserved, but psychological
factors, such as feelingrefreshed or feeling less
(08:50):
fatigued when you've gone for asoak, may influence a perceived
recovery and motivation.
So a bit of that placebo effectoh, I feel good, I feel relaxed
.
I'm sitting here in this hotwater and I don't want to leave.
Now the subjective benefits.
Although they weren't measureddirectly in this study, they
(09:11):
could play a role in athleticperformance and whether or not
athletes adhere to theirtraining regimens.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I guess, as we wrap this up, there was a study that
mimicked this in men.
Same kind of idea there's 30healthy men and they were
looking at muscle damage andthen cold water immersion and it
showed improvements in the coldwater soak versus the
controlled group for men, withthe colder water being more
(09:40):
effective than the somewhatlukewarm water.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Their temperatures were different.
Their cold water was 10 degreesfor 10 minutes, and also cold
water at 15 degrees for 10minutes.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, now we should also say this is a 30-person
study, so very small.
I do think there needs to beway bigger studies on this, a
lot more conclusive evidencethan like 30 dudes who sat in
some cold water before.
That seems like much too smalla sample size.
Though, as you said, we can'tdiscount the psychological
(10:18):
benefits.
If you think it's helping you,especially in like athletic
performance, that your mindsetis a huge part of you being able
to do anything, so I get that,that it gives you a
psychological benefit, all thepower to you.
It's not bad.
They didn't.
The studies don't show that ifyou do this it is detrimental to
(10:40):
your health, so at worst it'sdoing nothing and at best it
could help.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
There you go, and I always say mind over matter when
I'm at the gym.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I think if you have to soak in 10 degrees Celsius,
you're going to have to have alot of mind over matter, because
that matter is 10 degreesCelsius you're sitting in.
I guess, that's science newsfor this week.
This week in pet science we aregoing to be looking at
brachycephalic breeds of dogsand cats.
(11:11):
Chris, do you know some of thebrachycephalic breeds of dogs?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The Pekingese.
I used to want a Pika Pom andyou said- oh yeah, I remember
this, I remember.
I'm like Jason.
They have a Pekingese mixedwith a Pomeranian and it's
called a Pika Pom.
Isn't that so cute?
And you said no.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
I'm a big dog person, Chris.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I know.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Golden Retrievers are bigger.
I'm a big, Though.
My sister Marina's family justgot a new dog and it is freaking
adorable.
It's like a Corgi mix rescuething.
It is cute.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yeah, she very much is cute.
Her name is Rosie, but yeahsuper cute, but the Pekingese
Pugs are the type of dog thatare brachycephalic.
The Brussels Griffin dog, theFrench the Boxer, the French and
English bulldog are bothbrachycephalic dogs also cats
(12:09):
are brachycephalic, the flatfaced like the persian cats the
persian cats for sure, and theyall share a dramatically
distorted skull and those cuteflat round faces and their noses
pushed up between their eyesand.
And those features actually arenot occurring naturally but they
are the result of selectivebreeding because humans really
(12:34):
baby-like traits that we find inhumans, that we find cute in
humans and we're selectivelybreeding them to transfer into
the dogs and cats we'reselectively breeding them to
transfer into the dogs and cats.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So one of the selective breeding traits that
we've put into dogs is how dogscan move their eyebrows relative
to their wolf ancestors.
Have you ever watched Bernoullimove his eyebrows?
Speaker 2 (12:58):
It's so cute.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
He has very expressive eyebrows and I don't
know if it means anything.
He's just moving his eyebrows,but it looks like he's thinking
and of course that was a traitthat we've bred into dogs
because it gives them ahuman-like expression.
Right, that we move oureyebrows, like when we're
surprised.
(13:20):
Our eyebrows go up when we'reperplexed.
We might raise one over theother, and that's what Bernoulli
does.
I love.
He goes one eyebrow than theother, one eyebrow than the
other.
Callan, oh, she would do thattoo.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yes, and that's very distinctive, a very distinctive
difference between Callan andBeaker.
Beaker is very straight-faced,no expression, looking at you,
whereas Callan, you could talkto her and she would raise her
eyebrows, she would tilt herhead, she would really engage
(13:53):
with the conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
She was a good girl.
Anyways, let's get back to thestudy.
The study comes fromproceedings in the National
Academy of Science and one ofthe interesting things they
looked at was how these cats anddogs are of different species,
now resemble each other, like acat and a dog now look more like
(14:17):
each other than their own wildancestors, effectively erasing
millions of years of evolution.
This is an example ofconvergent evolution, and I
actually teach this in Science20, convergent and divergent.
But convergent evolution iswhere you have traits that
(14:38):
evolve independently, like youmight have.
Example winged animals birdshave wings, bats.
Bats have wings, but they'renot of the same species, so
species independently getsimilar traits.
This is due to usually naturalselection.
There's an advantage to fly,and if you are a bird you fly
away, and if you are some kindof rodent thing, you get wings
(15:02):
over time and you fly away likea bat yeah, like a bat.
So there's some kind ofadvantage and you both get it.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
But in this case, chris, it's not natural
selection it's artificialselection yeah because humans
are selecting for thosebaby-like features so flat faces
, high noses, round heads.
But those skull shapes do notactually exist in nature and
unfortunately there's somesignificant health consequences
(15:32):
for the animals having thosetraits.
Brachycephalic animals actuallycannot survive in the wild
because they have certain healthissues like difficulty
breathing, and they oftenrequire surgery to correct that.
They have eye problems, dentalissues, neurological conditions
(15:55):
and they actually can't tolerateheat and exercise due to the
poor oxygen exchange and ofcourse, some of these
brachycephalic breeds are waymore susceptible to this than
others.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
So this study looked at over 1,800 animals 148
domestic cats, 677 domestic dogsand they included some
extremely brachycephalic dogbreeds which we've mentioned
bulldogs French bulldogs,japanese chin and three
extremely brachycephalic dogbreeds which we've mentioned
bulldogs French bulldogs,japanese chin and three
extremely brachycephalic catbreeds the Persian Himalayan and
(16:32):
the Burmese.
Do you know how many timespeople say Burmese mountain dog?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Lots, yeah, but that's a cat breed so many times
.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Anyways, the skull data was from dozens of wild
canids, of the dog and thefelids, the cat family.
So they're looking at thesedomestic animals versus wild
animal skulls.
They scan them with CTs and usemuseum specimens and they
modeled the skull by 3D printingthem and then looked at their
atomical landmarks.
(17:01):
So this is a pretty in-depthstudy looking at skull shapes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So the anatomical discoveries included.
The brachycephalic animals haveskulls that are more similar to
each other than to their wildcounterparts.
Just like Jason said earlier,they actually have tilted
palates and shortened nasalregions, which results in those
restricted airways.
And actually this was veryinteresting Some Persian cats
actually lack nasal bones.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So I guess where we could wrap this up is that the
evidence seems to suggest thatdogs and cats use different
genes to develop thesebrachycephalic traits, and
understanding these geneticscould also perhaps understand
causes of those health problemsand inform better breeding
practices, meaning that, I guess, if your dog has that gene,
(17:55):
perhaps that's not a gene youdecide to pass on, especially
for the really severebrachycephalic health problems
for the really severebrachycephalic health problems.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Or what you could do is adopt a mixed breed animal
from a shelter.
That could be a suggestion,because those pets are less
likely to suffer from inbredhealth problems.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Also, chris, there's been a big push because it's a
taboo subject, right, becauseeverybody loves their dogs and
everybody loves their cats andfor the longest time it was not
something really you would talkabout because it causes hurt
feelings.
I'm sure people listening tothis have a few people have a
pug or a French bulldog and vetsare now saying perhaps now is
(18:39):
the time to stop that extremebreeding and maybe have the
breed standard go back to whatit was 60, 70 years ago.
Stop selecting those extremetraits.
Start selecting the traits forlonger nasal passages and a less
flat face.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Absolutely, because sometimes those animals are
disadvantaged, like they arewalking around and they just
poke their eye.
They poke their cornea withsomething sticking out, because
their eyes are just googly onthe sides of their heads, like
that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, they are cute and they are good dogs and I
don't know any Brachycephaliccats, but I've met a few pugs in
my life and they're pretty cutelittle dogs.
But I think we have to go withthe science and the experts here
.
That's pet science for thisweek.
Hello everybody, here's someways you can keep the science
(19:33):
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It's tons of fun.
(19:53):
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(20:17):
family and friends to listentoo.
Okay, on with the show.
Back to the interviews.
It's time for Ask an Expert onthe Science Podcast, and we are
thrilled to have the founder andCEO of Loyal, Celine Halliwa,
with us today.
Celine, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I'm doing great.
You nailed the name.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, I wrote it phonetically on my notes.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
It's a hard one.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yes, as we were talking, I'm a high school
chemistry teacher and there'sall manner of names I have to
learn and usually I have tospell them.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Oh geez, I actually have six names and I tortured
all of my teachers with it.
It was horrifying.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Oh, I have one of my classes, olivia and Olivia, so
keeping them, I just call themthe Olivias, I just give up.
But, celine, one of thequestions we asked right off the
start is where are you in theworld?
Where are you calling into theshow from?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I am currently sitting in a hotel lobby in San
Diego.
My dog is staring at me becausehe's very bored that I've been
sitting here for a while.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Whoa.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
But otherwise it's beautiful.
It's a sunny day out here inSoCal.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Nice.
Now we're going to get to someof the exciting stuff around
what you're working on now.
But just for background, what'syour training in science?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I did an undergraduate degree in
neuroscience.
I then started a PhD at Oxfordin the economics of preventative
medicine.
I've also done a lot ofstudying in nanobiotechnology,
and then I dropped out of my PhDpretty close to completion to
go work at a venture firm thatinvested in spoiler alert
longevity science and longevitytherapeutics.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
When you were young.
Were you a science kid, or didyou?
Did the bug bite you later inlife?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
yes and no.
So I did science fairs a lotand I'll always remember I got
some gold star, blue ribbon,something like that, because
after it's a little bit cringethinking back on it but after
hurricane katrina the leveesbroke in new orleans.
(22:26):
Obviously I did a science fairproject on what's the best type
of material to manufacturelevees out of, which was very
unintentionally political, alsodid something around like a
bridge collapse.
But I actually in high schoolwas an art kid and I got into
college originally for artschool and then made a.
Yeah, no, I was not a kind ofclassically good student from a
(22:50):
GPA standpoint, but I found mycalling in neuroscience and just
did a hard pivot and have neverregretted it.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
So I wonder if some of that creativity is why you
are where you are.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I think so.
I think so.
I think I ended up in sciencesbecause I fell in love with it,
not because I felt like I neededto get a job of a certain
stature Right, and yeah, I don'tknow.
I think I've always been reallygood at finding.
One of our values at Loyal isopportunities at the
intersection right.
One of our values at Loyal isopportunities at the
intersection right.
If you combine fields thataren't often considered to be
(23:27):
within the same scope or plane,you actually find really
interesting new opportunities towork on.
I think Loyal is really thepersonification of that, with
longevity, science, dog love andart right.
It's a consumer brand in manyways.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, yeah, I get you .
And before Loyal, you worked ata venture capitalist firm
called the Longevity Fund.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So I definitely never thought I would be a founder or
CEO.
My parents are notentrepreneurs Actually, my mom's
a teacher too and my dad worksin carpentry, woodworking stuff
and I got really interested inventure capital because, if
you're not familiar with venturecapital, it's basically a very
early stage of funding, forthink of it as like crazy ideas
that are more likely to failthan succeed, but if they
(24:11):
succeed could be reallyimportant, right?
So venture capital is a reallyimportant high risk funding
mechanism for a lot of reallyambitious and interesting
science, and I thought the wayto have my impact on the world
would be to help fund newscience, translating from the
laboratory into, hopefully, newmedicines.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And that was how I got exposed to the ideas that
led to Loyal.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
So that's the crux of why we so wanted to talk to you
.
On our show is, I stumbledacross a tweet and it was about
a longevity treatment for dogswhich is bananas, and I was
wondering if we could talk alittle bit about that like as
(24:54):
much as you can, I know, becauseit's probably tush, but right
about that.
But I was wondering if youcould talk maybe a little bit
about why dogs and why the pushfor the extending the lifespan
of dogs was the drive for this.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah, so I.
I never thought I would start adog longevity company.
I've always been a very biganimal person.
I've been vegetarian my entirelife.
I grew up with 15 cats and allthese rescue dogs and wild
animals that we wouldrehabilitate and I have my dog
here right now, but I wasinitially working on human aging
(25:31):
and human longevity and kind ofthis idea of can we develop
drugs that target the way webroadly age over time to reduce
the risk of us developing cancer, nerve zone disorders, like
other age-related diseases, inour later years?
We think about these diseasesas very binary right.
One day you're healthy, thenext day you're diagnosed with
(25:52):
cancer.
One day you're healthy, nextday you're diagnosed with
dementia.
But actually, mechanistically,these diseases develop over
decades.
Parkinson's, for example, whichis one form of nerveative
disorder, so a disease where youlose brain matter, and it's
very debilitating for thepatient and we're not able to
treat.
Currently there's some evidencesuggesting that you start
(26:13):
developing the precursors of thedisease decades before in your
40s, in your 30s, potentiallybefore you're actually
symptomatic and thereforediagnosed with it, and so that
always just seemed ridiculous tome that we were waiting until,
basically, the damage from theseaging diseases was so bad that
you then start having markedloss of function, loss of
(26:37):
quality of life, and then youtry to develop a drug to treat
it.
Instead of can we develop adrug that reduces the risk of
you ever getting diagnosed ascancer, with you ever getting
diagnosed as Parkinson's disease, with you getting frail with
age and, long story short, thebiology has actually been there
for a long time.
The kind of foundationalbiology between behind all of
(26:59):
our drugs is actually older thanme and humans.
To prove that a drug isextending healthy lifespan is
just logistically such adifficult feat.
I actually have no idea how oldyou are, but I'm assuming
you're middle-aged, and if Igave you a drug today and I was
like, okay, let's see if itextends your lifespan, it would
(27:19):
take decades for us to have anydefinitive data.
And so the initial insightaround dogs was dogs are very
biologically similar to us.
They've lived with us for tensof thousands of years, we've
co-evolved with them.
But they also live a muchshorter life, and so you can see
if a longevity drug is workingin a period of time that is much
(27:41):
more relevant and feasible,candidly, from a company
perspective.
And if something works in dogs,it might also work in people
because of this uniquerelationship.
Oh and, by the way, everybodywants their dog to live a longer
, healthier life.
It's pretty yeah, it's likepretty consensus.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I would give 10 years of my life to my dogs in a
second.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
No, totally, and it's my dog's pretty, pretty old and
so I can.
Obviously I work in the field,but still, like every time I
look at her, I think about it.
Right, she's got like this painthat I don't know if it's going
to come in three months or ayear, but everyone knows the
pain of losing a dog and so it'skind of was this like aha
moment that built over a coupleof years?
I just got so convicted in theidea.
(28:24):
I was just like I guess I gottado this now.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
and that was five years ago and dogs, like from
our, from the research I've doneon the show.
They have a lot of similarage-related diseases as humans
not a one-to-one, but similarpretty similar.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
yeah, they basically get and die from all of the same
age-related diseasesapproximately the same time in
their lifespan, with the oneexception being cardiovascular
disease.
Dogs don't get cholesterol,plaque buildups and associated
heart attacks at as high a rateas humans do, but they get
neurodegenerative diseases likewe do.
They get cancer like we do.
They get frailty like we do.
(29:01):
They get dementia.
Yeah, they get arthritis Hugething, and that's actually
pretty rare.
We do most research.
Most pharmaceutical researchand development and studying is
done in mice and rats, and thoseanimals just don't.
They don't get age-relateddiseases like we do.
So even trying to modeldementia in a mouse is just much
(29:23):
more difficult versus trying tomodel it in a dog, where my dog
has dementia right.
There's a lot of dogs walkingaround with dementia right now.
And if something helps them.
It's an interesting proof ofconcept that it might help a
human.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That's fascinating.
So this brings us to the thingthat's been making a little bit
of news in the science communitythe dog community is the
longevity drug that your companyhas developed, the canine
longevity drug, and, if I'm notmistaken, it's in efficacy
(29:59):
trials right now.
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yes, yeah.
So we got basically thispreliminary efficacy approval so
we'll be able to go to marketwith the data that we have in
dogs today showing what we thinkis benefit that will lead to
lifespan extension, with FDAthinks is also that, and in
parallel we're running thisbehemoth study in pet dogs over
(30:22):
a thousand dogs across the US uhstudy in pet dogs over a
thousand dogs across the us.
Wow, what a huge size.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
That's amazing yeah, it's really cool for animals,
right like I break down scienceevery week and it's like the
study size is like 50 dogs.
Yeah, that's right.
So it's not very no yeah, youtotally get it.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, it's the largest animal health study
that's ever been run, as far aswe know, by a pretty significant
margin.
I think in the end, once we'reupping enrollment to actually
1,300 dogs and if and when weachieve that, I believe we'll be
2x bigger than the next biggeststudy.
And it's 66 vet clinics acrossthe US, dogs of so many
(31:00):
different shapes and sizes, ofso many different shapes and
sizes.
And the reason we did that isbecause you really need to
capture the inherent variabilityin a dog right.
We need dogs whose owners runwith them every day and dogs who
sleep all day, like my dog anddogs that are.
She is such a she's not even acouch potato, she's a bed potato
(31:21):
.
The couch is not fancy enoughfor her anymore, she wants the
bed.
But you want to catch thatright, because all of these
things impact how a dog age.
So, yeah, it's this massivestudy and it's such a cool study
to run.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Oh, that's so exciting, so exciting, so I'm
going to press the rewind buttona little bit.
How does the drug work?
What are you targeting?
As much as you can tell us.
Obviously, you can't tell usexactly what's in it right now,
but what does it do?
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah, so we have two categories of drugs.
The drug I was just talkingabout, the drug that's closest
to market.
It's taking the biology ofbluer restriction and its
lifespan extension and making itmore accessible for the average
person and the average dogowner.
So the kind of onlyintervention that has been shown
(32:16):
consistently to extend lifespanand everything from or actually
they had a first interventionthat's been shown to
consistently extend lifespan andactually the first time it was
ever shown in any species, iscaloric restriction, this idea
of reducing the amount ofcalories that the animal or
human intakes without havingnutritional deficiency.
This isn't like ridiculouscaloric restriction but it's
(32:37):
just 20% less In dogs.
There was actually this reallycool study that was ran in the
90s by the dog food companyironically Purina, showing that
if you've calorically restrictedLabradors, litter mate paired
Labradors, that the caloricallyrestricted dogs live two years
longer than their litter mate,had a two-year delay of cancer
(33:00):
incidence still got cancer butthey happened two years later on
average Right and they had asix-year delay in osteoarthritis
incidents, that's it's huge,it's huge, it's absolutely huge.
And this is this very muchemulates what you get rats, mice
, etc.
There's a lot of work in humanson intermittent fasting and all
(33:20):
of that for lifespan extensiontoo.
But the kind of fundamentalchallenge with caloric
restriction is nobody wants tocalorically restrict their dog
for probably obvious reasons,right Like my dog is-.
It's like Labrador retrievers, Iwas going to say it would be
like cruel, unusual to do that,as a Labrador owners to
(33:41):
calorically restrict theiranimals, and so we wanted to
develop a drug that emulates thewhat's happening inside the
body, what's happeningmechanistically when you
calorically restrict a dog.
That's causing them to have alonger life without suppressing
their appetite and withoutsimply just being a weight loss.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Like an Ozempic for dogs.
You don't want it.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, you don't want an Ozempic for dogs.
One Ozempic can make you prettynauseous.
People don't want their dogspuking everywhere.
We don't know if it would makethe dogs puke, but you don't
want to take that risk.
But also, more importantly,there actually was a weight loss
drug in dogs that was approveda while ago.
That worked by appetitesuppression and it was a total
market failure because peoplefelt like their dogs didn't love
(34:27):
them anymore Because you had somuch joy out of feeding dogs
and doing training with them.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
For treats right.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Exactly, and if we're kind of honest with ourselves,
a lot of our dogs being cute,it's our dogs begging us for
food.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
You're not wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
It's a hard truth.
It's a hard truth and so wereally want to develop a drug
that would emulate the benefitsof restriction, but not just
because it's telling your dognot to eat food.
And, long story short, we foundthat drug.
That drug is what got thepreliminary efficacy approval
earlier this year.
And, of course, the otherreally thing that's super
important is safety.
(35:06):
Right, we picked a drug that wedon't have the safety approval
yet, but from all the data wehave, we believe we're going to
be able to say pretty stronglythis won't do harm to the
average dog and we'll hopefullyhave a lot of benefit, right?
So then it becomes a no brainer.
It's not going to hurt your dogand and it helps them, or
hopefully it helps them basedoff all the data and you can
(35:28):
afford it, which it's not goingto be.
It's not going to be free, butit's not going to be like super
expensive either.
It's going to be within therange of other veterinary
pharmaceuticals.
Then it's a no-brainer for youto do for your dog.
That's our lead drug drug andI'm happy to go into the other.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
What's the name of it ?
Does it have a name yet, or areyou guys still?
Speaker 3 (35:47):
So it does have a name.
I'm actually not allowed totell you.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh okay, We'll just call it like anti-snackola or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Oh my God, that's great.
No, so the kind of code name isLOITU, yeah, but it actually
will have a super fancypharmaceutical name.
But we're not allowed to use ituntil the drug's approved,
because otherwise you can thinkit seemed like a drug is
approved.
Oh my God, wolf Govee.
(36:19):
Oh God, wolf Govee, that'sactually good.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I like that.
I do run a huge social mediaaccount for for dogs and we're
90% puns.
So there you go.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Well, there you go, the puns are.
I have a lot of fun as CEOmaking dog puns.
It's one of the few joys andeveryone has to laugh.
They're on my payroll.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Oh, I see.
Okay, so this loyal to.
I'm sorry I forget, forget theactual name, because in my brain
I was being a sarcastic boy too.
I'm so sorry, selene wolf gobypersonally yeah trademark.
So this is the one that's intrials.
(37:00):
Do you have any data from thatyou can share with us?
What, or is that a nudge?
What can the average dog ownerexpect if things go the way they
should and it's approved withtheir dog?
If you get where I'm going withthis, I totally get where
you're going.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I would love to share data with you, even I don't
know.
I actually can't see the dataat all until it's over okay and
the study's not done for anotherfour years oh my goodness okay
so I will look forward tosharing that once I have my
hands on it.
Gotcha, there's a lot of likedata, cleanliness, ethics, stuff
(37:38):
to basically separate churchand state yeah, I, I understand,
I understand you.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
You don't want to be what is it?
Have the CEO, have their handon the deal.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yeah, no, I am very separated from it.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Gotcha, yeah, so is that the best case scenario?
Is that the length of time forthe drug to market?
Or if it passes like healthstuff, you'd get it out sooner
because you have good evidencethat it will be good for dogs?
Speaker 3 (38:06):
If my line of yeah, that makes total sense.
So we're hoping to bring thisproduct to market in the next
year.
So the lifespan extension studyisn't crucial for the kind of
the initial preliminary approval.
It's crucial to stay on market.
So basically, we'll go tomarket with the data that shows
that this drug is likely to beeffective, kind of that
(38:27):
preliminary efficacy approval Iwas talking about, and we've
already gotten that approval, sothat's gravy.
And then in parallel we'll runthis super intense in-depth
study to formally quantify okay,it's one year of lifespan, it's
nine months of lifespan, it's1.8 years of lifespan, whatever
it is, and that'll be requiredto stay on the market past about
(38:48):
2030.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Gotcha and best case it's mimicking the Labrador
study right.
Similar kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
I think so.
The line weaker in the sand isapproximately one healthier year
of life.
I think the lifespan extensionis super important, but actually
we are using lifespan extensionas a proxy for quality of life
improvement.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Quality of life is as important, or more so with a
dog.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
That's what people really care about, because there
is such a long decline,especially with larger breed
dogs, where you have your dogand they're alive, but they're
happy mentally but physicallyit's just they can't do what
they want to do anymore andthat's actually really hard to
objectively quantify right.
You can kind of look at a dogand tell are they younger, are
they older, are they movingaround in a better manner or in
(39:33):
a more frail manner, butactually objectively quantifying
that and normalizing it fromoptimistic dog owner to
pessimistic dog owner is superhard.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, I understand.
We have three dogs, two burnersand a golden Bunsen is our
oldest burner and he'll beturning eight right away and he
has a slipped disc, so it'sreally hard.
The last three months he'simproved immensely.
But, yeah, like he wants to do,but he couldn't do, so I get
(40:04):
that.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, that's tough yeah, oh yeah, that's hard with
the burners.
They're such sweeties.
But there are sweethearts youbet yeah, but it's like the
bigger dog breeds have suchshorter lifespans yeah, they do
yeah yeah, so that's what ourother drug is targeting it can
we talk about that, do you mind?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yes, absolutely.
This is a terrible segue, butwe have to save Bunsen and
Berner.
Yes, yeah, what's going on withyour the other drug, could you
talk to us about?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
it.
Yeah, so actually the firstdrug was already working on and
I would say, my, my, my child,so to speak, as in this is the
original science by which thecompany was founded.
Is this idea that we all acceptthat if you love Bernie's
Mountain Dogs or you love GreatDanes or even Rotties like me,
that you just have to acceptthat these dogs live much
(40:54):
shorter lifespans, right?
They can, at the extreme, live.
Great Dane will sometimes livelike six, seven, eight years.
Six, seven, eight years versusif you'd be fortunate enough to
be a chihuahua person or a minipoodle person, you're
potentially getting 17 yearswith your dog and we all think
this is natural, but it'sactually really weird if you
kind of step back and thinkabout it.
(41:17):
Yeah, stupid I hate it is stupid.
I definitely hate it too.
Sorry about that, selena, Ijust get frustrated no, I
literally agree, I'm, you know,I love all dogs, but I am a big
dog person, I will admit it.
I we had an off-site with theteam because we're a fully
remote company and everybodyflew in and we said bring your
dogs, but of course, only peoplewho bring their dogs or people
(41:39):
who had small dogs so they couldfly with them yeah and it was
so funny because the team waslike selene, you have so much
big dog energy, you're scaringour small dog because you can't
pet a chihuahua like you pet aroddy, like my roddy, I like
smack her butt and like togglewith her.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
My gushy faces you squish yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
You don't do that with a chihuahua.
The chihuahua was like what thehell runs away.
So it was.
Yeah, I was like, oh god, Igotta get better at this, gotta
get some more small dog energyin me.
But any, if you look at mammals, like on average, actually,
usually the larger an animal is,the longer their lifespan is.
So then the mouse will live twoyears, while even rats live
(42:20):
longer than mice, elephants liveinto the decades, whales live
into the decades and there's nospecies where you see a 2x
difference in average lifespan.
So I'm pretty short.
I'm not living twice as long assomebody who's six foot or six
foot five.
Long story short, the kind ofaha moment for Loyal is that
when we selectively bred tocreate these dog breeds since
(42:43):
all dog breeds are artificial,right, they are creations of
humans and we did this byinbreeding in most cases, not
because people are bad orwhatever, just because they
didn't know like they wereinbreeding themselves.
This was hundreds of years ago.
They're inbreeding themselvesand they're inbreeding their
cattle and they're inbreedingtheir dogs and this was super
effective to turn thedomesticated wolf mutt dog into
(43:07):
the poodle and the Germanshepherd and the Bernese
mountain dog and the hugephenotypic diversity we see in
dogs today, but unfortunately italso caused a lot of genetic
issues.
Great Danes get or sorry, sorrygerman shepherds get hip
dysplasia.
Bully breeds really strugglewith the breathing if they have
the flat faces.
Goldens gets yeah exactly,goldens get a certain form of
(43:32):
cancer at a much higher rateclean cancer.
You're right, yeah yep, and it'ssuper terrible because you just
you don't know it's there untilthey basically die of it that's
what happened to our goldenbefore Bunsen.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
God, I'm sorry.
No, it's golden.
The owners know about it.
Yeah, you bet.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, it's horrible.
And anyhow, the initial thesisof the company was hey, what if
the short lifespan of big dogsisn't normal, isn't natural,
isn't inherent?
But it's actually a geneticallyassociated accelerated aging
disease that we accidentallygave dogs when we were
selectively breeding them forsize, right, because if you pick
the puppy that grows really bigin puberty and you're like, oh,
(44:07):
that puppy, okay, breed it tothe other big puppy, you're not
following that dog to be like,oh, what happened to the puppy
that grew really fast in puberty, to see how they were at age
seven?
And it turns out that basicallygenetic pathways that cause a
dog to grow and double in sizereally quickly in puberty also
control rate of aging.
And these pathways exist in us.
(44:29):
They exist in all mammals, butin not dogs.
These genes, these kind ofgrowth hormones, turn down quite
a bit once the animal's fullygrown.
In dogs, in big dogs they don't.
So in big dogs you're havingthese growth hormones that are
circulating in the blood andthey're telling the dog grow,
divide, grow, divide.
And that means the dog'sgetting really big in puberty.
But then once a dog is fullygrown from a skeletal
(44:51):
perspective, those growthhormones are still circulating
around and they're telling thedog's body now okay, still got
to divide, still got to divide,and these dogs are literally
turning over from a metabolicperspective, at the extreme of
2x faster rate.
So, long story short, you'rejust seeing that these big dogs
are just, they have a compressedlifespan, they're aging at a
faster rate, and so the thesisof the drug, which has also
(45:13):
gotten this kind of preliminaryefficacy approval from the FDA,
is, once a dog is fully grown,can we turn down these levels of
growth hormone that are such ahigh concentration in big dogs
to levels that are seennaturally in dogs, but maybe a
more like an Aussie shepherd,right, a dog that has a 14 year
average lifespan instead of aseven year, and you're actually
(45:34):
able to do that pretty safelybecause it's a level that's seen
naturally in dogs anyhow.
So, yeah, we have two programswe're working on that.
One is an injectable, one's apill, and that's my pet project
personally.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Oh, my God, that is so exciting.
Sign us up for when it comesout, because we've got two
burners.
Our baby Bernoulli.
He just turned one a few daysago.
He's bigger than Bunsen now, sohe's our-.
Wow, yeah, he's bigger thanbunsen now, so he's our.
(46:05):
Wow, yeah, he's our big baby.
Yeah, I hope he lives as longas he can live.
All dogs should.
Yeah, yeah, very exciting.
So that maybe just to wrap upabout this drug slain, what's
the end date for this one?
The the lower the growth.
I don't have a snappy pun forthis big dog.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Short lifespan no good pun.
Yeah, I'm sure we can thinksomething through.
Probably 2027 is what we'reaiming towards.
Yeah, this one's a little bitfurther out, but we're I'm very
motivated personally too, so weare running as fast as we can.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, good science should not be rushed, yeah
rushed.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Yeah, you know there's a lot of safety work you
need to do.
There's a lot of justunderstanding, right, because
this is something that once thedogs are prescribed that they'll
be on it for the rest of theirlives.
So it's certainly a really highresponsibility to develop a
medicine like this so both ofthese drugs?
Speaker 1 (46:56):
when would your dog take them?
Is it like as soon as they canwhen they've hit their maturity?
That's what's.
Do you know the answer to that?
Yet I don't know.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, so we.
It depends on the profile ofthe drug, so the one that will
be approved first will be forsenior dogs of most sizes, so 10
years and up.
That's because it's targeting apathway that we think can
obviously delay rate of agingpotentially, but also have a
little bit of an acutebeneficial effect and so
starting it later can have a lotof benefit.
(47:28):
Uh, for the big dog shortlifespan it starts a lot sooner,
in part because a lot of bigdogs aren't alive at 10, but
also because it's more of apreventative mechanism, right,
it's more of a delay the rate ofthat dog's aging.
So you need to start it a bitsooner.
None of them are gonna bepuppies, or for very young dogs
gotcha.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Yeah, that makes sense.
For the big dogs, yeah, oh, howabout poor muzzle for the?
Speaker 3 (47:54):
oh god, that's horrifying how about?
Speaker 1 (47:57):
what about pupper?
Paws no.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
You should put it to your high school class.
I feel like they could nailthis.
The TikTok generation got this.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I got size mutters.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Oh my God, it's actually really funny, that's
all I got.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
That's all I got I think that's pretty good.
As we get to the end of ourchat.
Celine, one of the things weask all our guests is for a pet
story, and it can be a pet story, a current pet, a pet from your
past pet, but we love when ourguests share pet stories, so I
was wondering if you have onefor us.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
Story.
Oh man, I have a cat story.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Is that kosher?
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Oh, cats are great yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Okay, so I for the longest time only had a dog in
my adult life.
I had a lot of cats growing upand my boyfriend was very
anti-getting a cat.
I was like, come on, we need acat.
And he's like, absolutely not.
I was like, fine, whatever.
So I fly to Texas.
My family lives in Austin, I'mthere for some work thing and if
(49:04):
you're an Austin person,there's this very good burger
chain, local burger chain calledP Terry's that has like an
absolute bang in veggie burger.
So my dad picks me up from theairport it's super late, thank
God, as you'll see and I'm likeDad, I gotta get some food.
And so he picks me up and wedrive to the P Terry's chain
(49:25):
right by the airport.
As we're driving through thedrive-thru I see this little
dash across and I'm like, oh myGod.
And long story short, there wasthe world's tiniest kitten, like
the size of my not large hands,that was living under a
(49:45):
shipping container in theparking lot of this P terriers,
of this burger chain.
And this became a multi-dayordeal of trying to lure the
kitten out of the shippingcontainer.
It was super wild.
We tried burgers, I bought it aburger patty, I got it water,
he would come out, he would eat.
He was clearly starving.
Long story short, my dad, Isent him on a mission.
(50:08):
I'm like dad, you got to gofind a cat trap and he calls
everyone.
He knows he procures a cat trapin less than 12 hours, which
was amazing.
And we go back the next day andwe get the stinkiest, biggest
tin of sardines.
We put the cat trap down andthe cat jumps into it and the
(50:29):
catcher and it turns out likeliterally like a one, one pound
cat, so tiny.
But then the next issue comes,which is I'm flying home the
next day to california.
So then the entire day we havethis cat still in this cat trap,
who's like hissing like crazyand I'm eating their sardines
and then hissing and I'm likecarrying this cat trap with this
(50:50):
cat like and overall the petcodes and pet smarts and like
trying to find somebody, like ona sunday, who you need a health
certificate to fly with a cat,and I'm trying to find somebody
to like give me this healthcertificate and I'm like, I'm
like begging people.
I'm like, please, I can't leavethis cat, like I can't drop
this cat off at a shelter.
I need you to give me thegoddamn health.
(51:13):
And, long story short, this likewoman at petco is so sweet.
She sees me like begging thelike front desk person at the
like at the vet clinic in therewho clearly thinks I'm
absolutely mentally insane, andshe follows me out when I walk
out, defeated.
She's I know the perfect placeand she calls her vet clinic and
is like this woman needs helpand they open the red carpet for
(51:36):
me, they get me in the same day, within the hour, and get the
cat all of the shots that sheneeded so I could fly with her
like 12 hours later.
And I ended up naming her afterthe burger chain, after P Terry
.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
P Terry.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah, P Terry.
So I now have a chaotic teenagekitten named P Terry, who I
found in Austin.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
That is a sweet story .
Speaker 3 (52:07):
I love her more than anything.
She's so cute.
She every morning runs up to meand jumps in my arm and suckles
on my hair.
I'm guessing she was separatedfrom her mom pretty early, which
is so sad, but she's the cutest, cutest cat ever and I'm so
glad I found her in that parkinglot that's a cute story.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Do you, in hindsight, picture yourself in your
third's eye like you've got somecat that's in a cat trap and
you're like I need to get on aplane with this thing and people
are like what is wrong?
What are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (52:38):
oh my god, they literally thought I was nuts,
like I was carrying her, and thecat was dirty and mangy and
tiny and yeah, I was like alittle frantic.
I also had I was like gettingsome award at the university and
so like I had to be dressed upand at a location at a certain
time I couldn't bail on it, andso I was like trying to do all
of this before I went to theawards ceremony and I showed up
(53:01):
like looking like crap and itwas a whole thing.
But now I have the world's mostcutest chaotic kitten.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
Yeah, the, it's a cats and dogs and the pets that
we have like their lives are.
No, their lives are not cheap.
They're important creatureworld and giving that cat a
second chance and now it's gonnaknow only love and safety,
that's a pretty cool littlestory I know it breaks my heart
(53:31):
how she ended up there.
Speaker 3 (53:32):
So she's such a child .
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Honestly, I love that cat yeah, so sometimes the
difference between cats and dogsis dogs come from XXXY line and
I found this cat in behind myhouse.
That's where this cat is.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Oh yeah, the cat distribution system definitely
answered my prayers.
I didn't think it would be thischaotic distribution strategy,
but I'm here for it.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
Yeah, it's how we got our cat.
Our cat was a rescue too,ginger.
No, that's how we got our cat.
Our cat was a rescue too Ginger.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
No.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah, celine, this is the end.
Thank you so much for agreeingto be a guest on our show.
I know you are, as I have beentold, hopping from meeting to
meeting in a very busy life.
This is right up the alley ofthe science podcast and a topic
that's near and dear to theaudience that listens to the
show Possibly, probably,hopefully, extending the life of
(54:23):
the dogs in our houses that welove so much.
Speaker 3 (54:26):
Thank, you so much?
Yeah, no, thank you um.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Where can people find more information about yourself
, about loyal?
Is there a website?
Is there social media?
Speaker 3 (54:38):
yeah, loyalcom, I think is probably the best.
I'm also on twitter, celinehollywa, so if you can figure
out how to spell that, you canfollow me on twitter if it's
okay sorry x.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Oh, you can call it twitter.
Yeah, we'll have.
If it's okay with you, celine,we'll have some links in our
show notes that go to yourtwitter and that is totally fine
.
Okay, this has been a treat,and thank you so much for giving
up your time to chat with us.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
That's it for this week's show.
Thanks for coming back weekafter week to listen to the
science podcast.
Our top dogs get a shout out atthe end.
It's one of the perks ofsupporting us.
If you want to sign up, checkthe show notes.
Chris, take it away.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Amelia Fettig, rhi Oda, carol Hainel, jennifer
Challen, linnea Janik, karenChronister, vicky Otero, Christy
Walker, sarah Bram, wendy,diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin,
elizabeth Bourgeois, marianneMcNally, catherine Jordan, helen
Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois,marianne McNally, Catherine
(55:42):
Jordan, shelley Smith, lauraSteffensen, tracy Leinbach, ann
Uchida, heather Burback, kellyTracy Halberg, ben Rather,
debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer,mary Rader.
Bianca Hyde, andrew Lin, brendaClark, brianne Hawes, peggy
McKeel, holly Burge, KathyZerker, susan Wagner and Liz
Button.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
For science, empathy and cuteness.
Hello science enthusiasts.
I'm Jason Zukoski.
And I'm Chris Zukoski, we'rethe pet parents of Bunsen,
beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The science animals on social media.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
If you love science.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And you love pets.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
You've come to the right spot, so put on your
safety glasses and hold on toyour tail.
This is the Science Podcast.
Hello everybody and welcome tothe Science Podcast.
We hope you're happy andhealthy out there.
This is episode 14 of seasonseven.
As I mentioned in last week'sshow, Chris and I are in the
busiest time for us as teachersthe next.
(00:46):
Well, we've been through a busyweek, we've got another one or
two, we got the podcast out.
It's a really good show.
So I think we'll just get rightto it and cut down on the small
talk.
In science news we're going tobe looking at that cold water
dipping fad.
Is there any science behind it?
Maybe, maybe not.
(01:07):
And in pet science we'relooking at how the
brachycephalic dogs and thebrachycephalic cats are starting
to become more closelyresembling each other than their
wild counterparts.
Our guest is so interesting andso on point with what we care
about as a family science dogs,but also potentially extending
(01:31):
their lifespan.
And our guest is Celine Heliwa,who is the founder and CEO of
Loyal, and she's going to betalking to us about Loyal's
drugs that are in trial rightnow for uh, to increase the
longevity of dogs.
So fascinating.
All right, let's get to it.
There's no time like sciencetime this weekend Science news.
(01:55):
Chris, do you want to take acold dip in an icy lake ever.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Never.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
How about tomorrow?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Maybe someday.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You're not a fan of swimming in cold waters.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Absolutely not, Jason .
You, on the other hand, enjoyit.
But there was somethinginteresting.
When I went to Quebec and Idon't know what happened to me,
I went into cooler water and Idon't know what happened to me.
I went into cooler water and Istayed at a family's house Like
I was.
What's the word?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
for it.
You're billeted there almost.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, I was.
It was almost billeted at thishouse with this wonderful family
and they had a pool in thebackyard.
In Quebec Most people had apool in the area that I was at.
And she said, oh, every nightwe go for a dip in the pool.
And I said what?
And of course, because I was inQuebec, I thought let's try
(02:56):
anything.
And she said what she said ifyou move, it's good, but in
French c'est tout beau move it'sgood, but in French it's si tu
bous.
And so then I came home and wewent swimming in Waterton, which
is south here in southernAlberta, and I went into the
cold kind of river thing and youwere like who's this woman that
(03:17):
came back from Quebec?
You were shocked that I was inthe cold water.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You were fueled by wine and cheese.
You had superpowers from goingto Quebec for a little while.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, definitely fueled by the food there was
delicious and probablynutritious, but it was very good
.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And from my part, growing up where I have grown up
in Alberta, the water here likethere is no warm water in
Alberta, canada.
The lakes maybe warm up a bitby I don't know end of July,
start of August and we would goswimming in mountain lakes.
I love it.
I love swimming in mountainlakes.
(04:00):
You can't stay in there forhours at a time, but there's
nothing like it.
Anyways, that's where the studycomes in.
There has been a lot of I wantto say health and fitness
influencers or people wantingfolks to get in on the cold
water plunge for health.
(04:20):
Have you heard about this,chris?
Has this been on your radar?
It's been on mine.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's been on a little bit of my radar for sure where
there's potential healthbenefits for dunking in cold
water after you work out, orhaving a soak in hot water or
warm water helps you relax.
So there has been lots ofstudies done on men, but
unfortunately studies on womenare few and far between.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So that's where this study comes in.
They took 30 healthy women withan average age of 23.3 years.
There was an exercise protocol.
They had to do five sets of 20drop jumps from a 0.6 meter high
box.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Now, Jason, do you do drop jumps during your workouts
?
Your workouts sound very highintensity training.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, my Monday workouts.
I do conditioning to keep myold body that's getting decrepit
as in good a shape as I waswhen I was younger.
I do some jumping around, Iflip tires, I push this super
heavy sled thing.
There's like rope slams that Ido.
It's like all of thesedifferent exercises.
Yes, I do drop jumps.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
So jumping off of a box that is just over half a
meter in height, jumping off ofthe box onto the ground and then
explosively jumping back ontothe box, 20 times Five sets of
those, you've done that.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I'm not a great jumper, but yeah, I have done
that.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yes, oh, I can tell you right now.
If my trainer said let's dothese, I would say no, thank you
.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, that's a drop jump.
So five sets of them.
Anyways, they had to get thepeople to exercise because the
claim of cold water is it does abunch of good things for your
body.
After this exercise, one groupwas put into cold water.
The cold water was 10 degreesCelsius for 10 minutes.
That's chilly 10 degreesCelsius.
You're going to feel that whenyou get in there.
(06:24):
The other group was put in hotwater, so that's 40 degrees
Celsius for 10 minutes.
And then there was a controlgroup who'd got nothing.
Maybe they were just given amagazine.
They had to wander around.
Anyways, those were the threedifferent interventions.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And not only that there were the interventions,
but there was, it happened rightimmediately after the exercise,
those scary sounding jumps, andthen again two hours later.
So yeah, back into the colddrink you go.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
They took some measurements, obviously
measurements before,measurements after.
They looked at for musclestrength, so that was a maximal
voluntary contraction, sosqueezing as hard as you can,
how sore you were.
Of course that's subjectiveMuscle swelling.
So doing all those jumps maybeyour knee might be swelled a bit
(07:18):
.
And of course that's a claim ofcold water soaking, as it helps
with swelling, and abiochemical marker which looked
at serum creatine kinase levels.
So creatine of course is in alot of red meats.
You can take that to.
I guess there's some.
There's.
There is evidence that if youtake creatine it does help with
(07:38):
weightlifting.
So this is something to lookand see if you make more natural
creatine from the cold watersoak.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And they did these assessments, a baseline
assessment before all thatjumping and at 24, 48, and 72
hours post-exercises.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Not the biggest study group size, but the findings I
think are interesting in thatthere was no difference in
muscle strength, soreness,swelling or that creatine among
the three different groupssoaking in hot water, soaking in
cold water or doing absolutelynothing.
In fact both cold and hot waterdid not accelerate recovery at
(08:22):
all.
There was no difference betweenthat and the group that was the
control group.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
This study highlights the need for more
gender-specific researchexploring how does exercise
affect women.
But there are somepsychological considerations
from this study.
Psychological benefits were notobserved, but psychological
factors, such as feelingrefreshed or feeling less
(08:50):
fatigued when you've gone for asoak, may influence a perceived
recovery and motivation.
So a bit of that placebo effectoh, I feel good, I feel relaxed
.
I'm sitting here in this hotwater and I don't want to leave.
Now the subjective benefits.
Although they weren't measureddirectly in this study, they
(09:11):
could play a role in athleticperformance and whether or not
athletes adhere to theirtraining regimens.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
I guess, as we wrap this up, there was a study that
mimicked this in men.
Same kind of idea there's 30healthy men and they were
looking at muscle damage andthen cold water immersion and it
showed improvements in the coldwater soak versus the
controlled group for men, withthe colder water being more
(09:40):
effective than the somewhatlukewarm water.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Their temperatures were different.
Their cold water was 10 degreesfor 10 minutes, and also cold
water at 15 degrees for 10minutes.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, now we should also say this is a 30-person
study, so very small.
I do think there needs to beway bigger studies on this, a
lot more conclusive evidencethan like 30 dudes who sat in
some cold water before.
That seems like much too smalla sample size.
Though, as you said, we can'tdiscount the psychological
(10:18):
benefits.
If you think it's helping you,especially in like athletic
performance, that your mindsetis a huge part of you being able
to do anything, so I get that,that it gives you a
psychological benefit, all thepower to you.
It's not bad.
They didn't.
The studies don't show that ifyou do this it is detrimental to
(10:40):
your health, so at worst it'sdoing nothing and at best it
could help.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
There you go, and I always say mind over matter when
I'm at the gym.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I think if you have to soak in 10 degrees Celsius,
you're going to have to have alot of mind over matter, because
that matter is 10 degreesCelsius you're sitting in.
I guess, that's science newsfor this week.
This week in pet science we aregoing to be looking at
brachycephalic breeds of dogsand cats.
(11:11):
Chris, do you know some of thebrachycephalic breeds of dogs?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The Pekingese.
I used to want a Pika Pom andyou said- oh yeah, I remember
this, I remember.
I'm like Jason.
They have a Pekingese mixedwith a Pomeranian and it's
called a Pika Pom.
Isn't that so cute?
And you said no.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
I'm a big dog person, Chris.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I know.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Golden Retrievers are bigger.
I'm a big, Though.
My sister Marina's family justgot a new dog and it is freaking
adorable.
It's like a Corgi mix rescuething.
It is cute.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yeah, she very much is cute.
Her name is Rosie, but yeahsuper cute, but the Pekingese
Pugs are the type of dog thatare brachycephalic.
The Brussels Griffin dog, theFrench the Boxer, the French and
English bulldog are bothbrachycephalic dogs also cats
(12:09):
are brachycephalic, the flatfaced like the persian cats the
persian cats for sure, and theyall share a dramatically
distorted skull and those cuteflat round faces and their noses
pushed up between their eyesand.
And those features actually arenot occurring naturally but they
are the result of selectivebreeding because humans really
(12:34):
baby-like traits that we find inhumans, that we find cute in
humans and we're selectivelybreeding them to transfer into
the dogs and cats we'reselectively breeding them to
transfer into the dogs and cats.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So one of the selective breeding traits that
we've put into dogs is how dogscan move their eyebrows relative
to their wolf ancestors.
Have you ever watched Bernoullimove his eyebrows?
Speaker 2 (12:58):
It's so cute.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
He has very expressive eyebrows and I don't
know if it means anything.
He's just moving his eyebrows,but it looks like he's thinking
and of course that was a traitthat we've bred into dogs
because it gives them ahuman-like expression.
Right, that we move oureyebrows, like when we're
surprised.
(13:20):
Our eyebrows go up when we'reperplexed.
We might raise one over theother, and that's what Bernoulli
does.
I love.
He goes one eyebrow than theother, one eyebrow than the
other.
Callan, oh, she would do thattoo.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yes, and that's very distinctive, a very distinctive
difference between Callan andBeaker.
Beaker is very straight-faced,no expression, looking at you,
whereas Callan, you could talkto her and she would raise her
eyebrows, she would tilt herhead, she would really engage
(13:53):
with the conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
She was a good girl.
Anyways, let's get back to thestudy.
The study comes fromproceedings in the National
Academy of Science and one ofthe interesting things they
looked at was how these cats anddogs are of different species,
now resemble each other, like acat and a dog now look more like
(14:17):
each other than their own wildancestors, effectively erasing
millions of years of evolution.
This is an example ofconvergent evolution, and I
actually teach this in Science20, convergent and divergent.
But convergent evolution iswhere you have traits that
(14:38):
evolve independently, like youmight have.
Example winged animals birdshave wings, bats.
Bats have wings, but they'renot of the same species, so
species independently getsimilar traits.
This is due to usually naturalselection.
There's an advantage to fly,and if you are a bird you fly
away, and if you are some kindof rodent thing, you get wings
(15:02):
over time and you fly away likea bat yeah, like a bat.
So there's some kind ofadvantage and you both get it.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
But in this case, chris, it's not natural
selection it's artificialselection yeah because humans
are selecting for thosebaby-like features so flat faces
, high noses, round heads.
But those skull shapes do notactually exist in nature and
unfortunately there's somesignificant health consequences
(15:32):
for the animals having thosetraits.
Brachycephalic animals actuallycannot survive in the wild
because they have certain healthissues like difficulty
breathing, and they oftenrequire surgery to correct that.
They have eye problems, dentalissues, neurological conditions
(15:55):
and they actually can't tolerateheat and exercise due to the
poor oxygen exchange and ofcourse, some of these
brachycephalic breeds are waymore susceptible to this than
others.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
So this study looked at over 1,800 animals 148
domestic cats, 677 domestic dogsand they included some
extremely brachycephalic dogbreeds which we've mentioned
bulldogs French bulldogs,japanese chin and three
extremely brachycephalic dogbreeds which we've mentioned
bulldogs French bulldogs,japanese chin and three
extremely brachycephalic catbreeds the Persian Himalayan and
(16:32):
the Burmese.
Do you know how many timespeople say Burmese mountain dog?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Lots, yeah, but that's a cat breed so many times
.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Anyways, the skull data was from dozens of wild
canids, of the dog and thefelids, the cat family.
So they're looking at thesedomestic animals versus wild
animal skulls.
They scan them with CTs and usemuseum specimens and they
modeled the skull by 3D printingthem and then looked at their
atomical landmarks.
(17:01):
So this is a pretty in-depthstudy looking at skull shapes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So the anatomical discoveries included.
The brachycephalic animals haveskulls that are more similar to
each other than to their wildcounterparts.
Just like Jason said earlier,they actually have tilted
palates and shortened nasalregions, which results in those
restricted airways.
And actually this was veryinteresting Some Persian cats
actually lack nasal bones.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
So I guess where we could wrap this up is that the
evidence seems to suggest thatdogs and cats use different
genes to develop thesebrachycephalic traits, and
understanding these geneticscould also perhaps understand
causes of those health problemsand inform better breeding
practices, meaning that, I guess, if your dog has that gene,
(17:55):
perhaps that's not a gene youdecide to pass on, especially
for the really severebrachycephalic health problems
for the really severebrachycephalic health problems.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Or what you could do is adopt a mixed breed animal
from a shelter.
That could be a suggestion,because those pets are less
likely to suffer from inbredhealth problems.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Also, chris, there's been a big push because it's a
taboo subject, right, becauseeverybody loves their dogs and
everybody loves their cats andfor the longest time it was not
something really you would talkabout because it causes hurt
feelings.
I'm sure people listening tothis have a few people have a
pug or a French bulldog and vetsare now saying perhaps now is
(18:39):
the time to stop that extremebreeding and maybe have the
breed standard go back to whatit was 60, 70 years ago.
Stop selecting those extremetraits.
Start selecting the traits forlonger nasal passages and a less
flat face.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Absolutely, because sometimes those animals are
disadvantaged, like they arewalking around and they just
poke their eye.
They poke their cornea withsomething sticking out, because
their eyes are just googly onthe sides of their heads, like
that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, they are cute and they are good dogs and I
don't know any Brachycephaliccats, but I've met a few pugs in
my life and they're pretty cutelittle dogs.
But I think we have to go withthe science and the experts here
.
That's pet science for thisweek.
Hello everybody, here's someways you can keep the science
(19:33):
podcast free.
Number one in our show notessign up to be a member of our
Paw Pack Plus community.
It's an amazing community offolks who love pets and folks
who love science.
We have tons of bonus Bunsenand Beaker content there and we
have live streams every Sundaywith our community.
It's tons of fun.
(19:53):
Also, think about checking outour merch store.
We've got the Bunsen stuffy,the Beaker stuffy and now the
ginger stuffy.
That's right, Ginger thescience cat has a little replica
.
It's right, Ginger the sciencecat has a little replica.
It's adorable.
It's so soft, with the giantfluffy tail, safety glasses and
a lab coat.
And number three if you'relistening to the podcast on any
place that writes podcasts, giveus a great rating and tell your
(20:17):
family and friends to listentoo.
Okay, on with the show.
Back to the interviews.
It's time for Ask an Expert onthe Science Podcast, and we are
thrilled to have the founder andCEO of Loyal, Celine Halliwa,
with us today.
Celine, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I'm doing great.
You nailed the name.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh, I wrote it phonetically on my notes.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
It's a hard one.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yes, as we were talking, I'm a high school
chemistry teacher and there'sall manner of names I have to
learn and usually I have tospell them.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Oh geez, I actually have six names and I tortured
all of my teachers with it.
It was horrifying.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Oh, I have one of my classes, olivia and Olivia, so
keeping them, I just call themthe Olivias, I just give up.
But, celine, one of thequestions we asked right off the
start is where are you in theworld?
Where are you calling into theshow from?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
I am currently sitting in a hotel lobby in San
Diego.
My dog is staring at me becausehe's very bored that I've been
sitting here for a while.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Whoa.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
But otherwise it's beautiful.
It's a sunny day out here inSoCal.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Nice.
Now we're going to get to someof the exciting stuff around
what you're working on now.
But just for background, what'syour training in science?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I did an undergraduate degree in
neuroscience.
I then started a PhD at Oxfordin the economics of preventative
medicine.
I've also done a lot ofstudying in nanobiotechnology,
and then I dropped out of my PhDpretty close to completion to
go work at a venture firm thatinvested in spoiler alert
longevity science and longevitytherapeutics.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
When you were young.
Were you a science kid, or didyou?
Did the bug bite you later inlife?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
yes and no.
So I did science fairs a lotand I'll always remember I got
some gold star, blue ribbon,something like that, because
after it's a little bit cringethinking back on it but after
hurricane katrina the leveesbroke in new orleans.
(22:26):
Obviously I did a science fairproject on what's the best type
of material to manufacturelevees out of, which was very
unintentionally political, alsodid something around like a
bridge collapse.
But I actually in high schoolwas an art kid and I got into
college originally for artschool and then made a.
Yeah, no, I was not a kind ofclassically good student from a
(22:50):
GPA standpoint, but I found mycalling in neuroscience and just
did a hard pivot and have neverregretted it.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
So I wonder if some of that creativity is why you
are where you are.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I think so.
I think so.
I think I ended up in sciencesbecause I fell in love with it,
not because I felt like I neededto get a job of a certain
stature Right, and yeah, I don'tknow.
I think I've always been reallygood at finding.
One of our values at Loyal isopportunities at the
intersection right.
One of our values at Loyal isopportunities at the
intersection right.
If you combine fields thataren't often considered to be
(23:27):
within the same scope or plane,you actually find really
interesting new opportunities towork on.
I think Loyal is really thepersonification of that, with
longevity, science, dog love andart right.
It's a consumer brand in manyways.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, yeah, I get you .
And before Loyal, you worked ata venture capitalist firm
called the Longevity Fund.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So I definitely never thought I would be a founder or
CEO.
My parents are notentrepreneurs Actually, my mom's
a teacher too and my dad worksin carpentry, woodworking stuff
and I got really interested inventure capital because, if
you're not familiar with venturecapital, it's basically a very
early stage of funding, forthink of it as like crazy ideas
that are more likely to failthan succeed, but if they
(24:11):
succeed could be reallyimportant, right?
So venture capital is a reallyimportant high risk funding
mechanism for a lot of reallyambitious and interesting
science, and I thought the wayto have my impact on the world
would be to help fund newscience, translating from the
laboratory into, hopefully, newmedicines.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And that was how I got exposed to the ideas that
led to Loyal.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
So that's the crux of why we so wanted to talk to you
.
On our show is, I stumbledacross a tweet and it was about
a longevity treatment for dogswhich is bananas, and I was
wondering if we could talk alittle bit about that like as
(24:54):
much as you can, I know, becauseit's probably tush, but right
about that.
But I was wondering if youcould talk maybe a little bit
about why dogs and why the pushfor the extending the lifespan
of dogs was the drive for this.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah, so I.
I never thought I would start adog longevity company.
I've always been a very biganimal person.
I've been vegetarian my entirelife.
I grew up with 15 cats and allthese rescue dogs and wild
animals that we wouldrehabilitate and I have my dog
here right now, but I wasinitially working on human aging
(25:31):
and human longevity and kind ofthis idea of can we develop
drugs that target the way webroadly age over time to reduce
the risk of us developing cancer, nerve zone disorders, like
other age-related diseases, inour later years?
We think about these diseasesas very binary right.
One day you're healthy, thenext day you're diagnosed with
(25:52):
cancer.
One day you're healthy, nextday you're diagnosed with
dementia.
But actually, mechanistically,these diseases develop over
decades.
Parkinson's, for example, whichis one form of nerveative
disorder, so a disease where youlose brain matter, and it's
very debilitating for thepatient and we're not able to
treat.
Currently there's some evidencesuggesting that you start
(26:13):
developing the precursors of thedisease decades before in your
40s, in your 30s, potentiallybefore you're actually
symptomatic and thereforediagnosed with it, and so that
always just seemed ridiculous tome that we were waiting until,
basically, the damage from theseaging diseases was so bad that
you then start having markedloss of function, loss of
(26:37):
quality of life, and then youtry to develop a drug to treat
it.
Instead of can we develop adrug that reduces the risk of
you ever getting diagnosed ascancer, with you ever getting
diagnosed as Parkinson's disease, with you getting frail with
age and, long story short, thebiology has actually been there
for a long time.
The kind of foundationalbiology between behind all of
(26:59):
our drugs is actually older thanme and humans.
To prove that a drug isextending healthy lifespan is
just logistically such adifficult feat.
I actually have no idea how oldyou are, but I'm assuming
you're middle-aged, and if Igave you a drug today and I was
like, okay, let's see if itextends your lifespan, it would
(27:19):
take decades for us to have anydefinitive data.
And so the initial insightaround dogs was dogs are very
biologically similar to us.
They've lived with us for tensof thousands of years, we've
co-evolved with them.
But they also live a muchshorter life, and so you can see
if a longevity drug is workingin a period of time that is much
(27:41):
more relevant and feasible,candidly, from a company
perspective.
And if something works in dogs,it might also work in people
because of this uniquerelationship.
Oh and, by the way, everybodywants their dog to live a longer
, healthier life.
It's pretty yeah, it's likepretty consensus.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I would give 10 years of my life to my dogs in a
second.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
No, totally, and it's my dog's pretty, pretty old and
so I can.
Obviously I work in the field,but still, like every time I
look at her, I think about it.
Right, she's got like this painthat I don't know if it's going
to come in three months or ayear, but everyone knows the
pain of losing a dog and so it'skind of was this like aha
moment that built over a coupleof years?
I just got so convicted in theidea.
(28:24):
I was just like I guess I gottado this now.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
and that was five years ago and dogs, like from
our, from the research I've doneon the show.
They have a lot of similarage-related diseases as humans
not a one-to-one, but similarpretty similar.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
yeah, they basically get and die from all of the same
age-related diseasesapproximately the same time in
their lifespan, with the oneexception being cardiovascular
disease.
Dogs don't get cholesterol,plaque buildups and associated
heart attacks at as high a rateas humans do, but they get
neurodegenerative diseases likewe do.
They get cancer like we do.
They get frailty like we do.
(29:01):
They get dementia.
Yeah, they get arthritis Hugething, and that's actually
pretty rare.
We do most research.
Most pharmaceutical researchand development and studying is
done in mice and rats, and thoseanimals just don't.
They don't get age-relateddiseases like we do.
So even trying to modeldementia in a mouse is just much
(29:23):
more difficult versus trying tomodel it in a dog, where my dog
has dementia right.
There's a lot of dogs walkingaround with dementia right now.
And if something helps them.
It's an interesting proof ofconcept that it might help a
human.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That's fascinating.
So this brings us to the thingthat's been making a little bit
of news in the science communitythe dog community is the
longevity drug that your companyhas developed, the canine
longevity drug, and, if I'm notmistaken, it's in efficacy
(29:59):
trials right now.
Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yes, yeah.
So we got basically thispreliminary efficacy approval so
we'll be able to go to marketwith the data that we have in
dogs today showing what we thinkis benefit that will lead to
lifespan extension, with FDAthinks is also that, and in
parallel we're running thisbehemoth study in pet dogs over
(30:22):
a thousand dogs across the US uhstudy in pet dogs over a
thousand dogs across the us.
Wow, what a huge size.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
That's amazing yeah, it's really cool for animals,
right like I break down scienceevery week and it's like the
study size is like 50 dogs.
Yeah, that's right.
So it's not very no yeah, youtotally get it.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, it's the largest animal health study
that's ever been run, as far aswe know, by a pretty significant
margin.
I think in the end, once we'reupping enrollment to actually
1,300 dogs and if and when weachieve that, I believe we'll be
2x bigger than the next biggeststudy.
And it's 66 vet clinics acrossthe US, dogs of so many
(31:00):
different shapes and sizes, ofso many different shapes and
sizes.
And the reason we did that isbecause you really need to
capture the inherent variabilityin a dog right.
We need dogs whose owners runwith them every day and dogs who
sleep all day, like my dog anddogs that are.
She is such a she's not even acouch potato, she's a bed potato
(31:21):
.
The couch is not fancy enoughfor her anymore, she wants the
bed.
But you want to catch thatright, because all of these
things impact how a dog age.
So, yeah, it's this massivestudy and it's such a cool study
to run.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Oh, that's so exciting, so exciting, so I'm
going to press the rewind buttona little bit.
How does the drug work?
What are you targeting?
As much as you can tell us.
Obviously, you can't tell usexactly what's in it right now,
but what does it do?
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah, so we have two categories of drugs.
The drug I was just talkingabout, the drug that's closest
to market.
It's taking the biology ofbluer restriction and its
lifespan extension and making itmore accessible for the average
person and the average dogowner.
So the kind of onlyintervention that has been shown
(32:16):
consistently to extend lifespanand everything from or actually
they had a first interventionthat's been shown to
consistently extend lifespan andactually the first time it was
ever shown in any species, iscaloric restriction, this idea
of reducing the amount ofcalories that the animal or
human intakes without havingnutritional deficiency.
This isn't like ridiculouscaloric restriction but it's
(32:37):
just 20% less In dogs.
There was actually this reallycool study that was ran in the
90s by the dog food companyironically Purina, showing that
if you've calorically restrictedLabradors, litter mate paired
Labradors, that the caloricallyrestricted dogs live two years
longer than their litter mate,had a two-year delay of cancer
(33:00):
incidence still got cancer butthey happened two years later on
average Right and they had asix-year delay in osteoarthritis
incidents, that's it's huge,it's huge, it's absolutely huge.
And this is this very muchemulates what you get rats, mice
, etc.
There's a lot of work in humanson intermittent fasting and all
(33:20):
of that for lifespan extensiontoo.
But the kind of fundamentalchallenge with caloric
restriction is nobody wants tocalorically restrict their dog
for probably obvious reasons,right Like my dog is-.
It's like Labrador retrievers, Iwas going to say it would be
like cruel, unusual to do that,as a Labrador owners to
(33:41):
calorically restrict theiranimals, and so we wanted to
develop a drug that emulates thewhat's happening inside the
body, what's happeningmechanistically when you
calorically restrict a dog.
That's causing them to have alonger life without suppressing
their appetite and withoutsimply just being a weight loss.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Like an Ozempic for dogs.
You don't want it.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, you don't want an Ozempic for dogs.
One Ozempic can make you prettynauseous.
People don't want their dogspuking everywhere.
We don't know if it would makethe dogs puke, but you don't
want to take that risk.
But also, more importantly,there actually was a weight loss
drug in dogs that was approveda while ago.
That worked by appetitesuppression and it was a total
market failure because peoplefelt like their dogs didn't love
(34:27):
them anymore Because you had somuch joy out of feeding dogs
and doing training with them.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
For treats right.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Exactly, and if we're kind of honest with ourselves,
a lot of our dogs being cute,it's our dogs begging us for
food.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
You're not wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
It's a hard truth.
It's a hard truth and so wereally want to develop a drug
that would emulate the benefitsof restriction, but not just
because it's telling your dognot to eat food.
And, long story short, we foundthat drug.
That drug is what got thepreliminary efficacy approval
earlier this year.
And, of course, the otherreally thing that's super
important is safety.
(35:06):
Right, we picked a drug that wedon't have the safety approval
yet, but from all the data wehave, we believe we're going to
be able to say pretty stronglythis won't do harm to the
average dog and we'll hopefullyhave a lot of benefit, right?
So then it becomes a no brainer.
It's not going to hurt your dogand and it helps them, or
hopefully it helps them basedoff all the data and you can
(35:28):
afford it, which it's not goingto be.
It's not going to be free, butit's not going to be like super
expensive either.
It's going to be within therange of other veterinary
pharmaceuticals.
Then it's a no-brainer for youto do for your dog.
That's our lead drug drug andI'm happy to go into the other.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
What's the name of it ?
Does it have a name yet, or areyou guys still?
Speaker 3 (35:47):
So it does have a name.
I'm actually not allowed totell you.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh okay, We'll just call it like anti-snackola or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Oh my God, that's great.
No, so the kind of code name isLOITU, yeah, but it actually
will have a super fancypharmaceutical name.
But we're not allowed to use ituntil the drug's approved,
because otherwise you can thinkit seemed like a drug is
approved.
Oh my God, wolf Govee.
(36:19):
Oh God, wolf Govee, that'sactually good.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I like that.
I do run a huge social mediaaccount for for dogs and we're
90% puns.
So there you go.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Well, there you go, the puns are.
I have a lot of fun as CEOmaking dog puns.
It's one of the few joys andeveryone has to laugh.
They're on my payroll.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Oh, I see.
Okay, so this loyal to.
I'm sorry I forget, forget theactual name, because in my brain
I was being a sarcastic boy too.
I'm so sorry, selene wolf gobypersonally yeah trademark.
So this is the one that's intrials.
(37:00):
Do you have any data from thatyou can share with us?
What, or is that a nudge?
What can the average dog ownerexpect if things go the way they
should and it's approved withtheir dog?
If you get where I'm going withthis, I totally get where
you're going.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I would love to share data with you, even I don't
know.
I actually can't see the dataat all until it's over okay and
the study's not done for anotherfour years oh my goodness okay
so I will look forward tosharing that once I have my
hands on it.
Gotcha, there's a lot of likedata, cleanliness, ethics, stuff
(37:38):
to basically separate churchand state yeah, I, I understand,
I understand you.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
You don't want to be what is it?
Have the CEO, have their handon the deal.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Yeah, no, I am very separated from it.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Gotcha, yeah, so is that the best case scenario?
Is that the length of time forthe drug to market?
Or if it passes like healthstuff, you'd get it out sooner
because you have good evidencethat it will be good for dogs?
Speaker 3 (38:06):
If my line of yeah, that makes total sense.
So we're hoping to bring thisproduct to market in the next
year.
So the lifespan extension studyisn't crucial for the kind of
the initial preliminary approval.
It's crucial to stay on market.
So basically, we'll go tomarket with the data that shows
that this drug is likely to beeffective, kind of that
(38:27):
preliminary efficacy approval Iwas talking about, and we've
already gotten that approval, sothat's gravy.
And then in parallel we'll runthis super intense in-depth
study to formally quantify okay,it's one year of lifespan, it's
nine months of lifespan, it's1.8 years of lifespan, whatever
it is, and that'll be requiredto stay on the market past about
(38:48):
2030.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Gotcha and best case it's mimicking the Labrador
study right.
Similar kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
I think so.
The line weaker in the sand isapproximately one healthier year
of life.
I think the lifespan extensionis super important, but actually
we are using lifespan extensionas a proxy for quality of life
improvement.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Quality of life is as important, or more so with a
dog.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
That's what people really care about, because there
is such a long decline,especially with larger breed
dogs, where you have your dogand they're alive, but they're
happy mentally but physicallyit's just they can't do what
they want to do anymore andthat's actually really hard to
objectively quantify right.
You can kind of look at a dogand tell are they younger, are
they older, are they movingaround in a better manner or in
(39:33):
a more frail manner, butactually objectively quantifying
that and normalizing it fromoptimistic dog owner to
pessimistic dog owner is superhard.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, I understand.
We have three dogs, two burnersand a golden Bunsen is our
oldest burner and he'll beturning eight right away and he
has a slipped disc, so it'sreally hard.
The last three months he'simproved immensely.
But, yeah, like he wants to do,but he couldn't do, so I get
(40:04):
that.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, that's tough yeah, oh yeah, that's hard with
the burners.
They're such sweeties.
But there are sweethearts youbet yeah, but it's like the
bigger dog breeds have suchshorter lifespans yeah, they do
yeah yeah, so that's what ourother drug is targeting it can
we talk about that, do you mind?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yes, absolutely.
This is a terrible segue, butwe have to save Bunsen and
Berner.
Yes, yeah, what's going on withyour the other drug, could you
talk to us about?
Speaker 3 (40:32):
it.
Yeah, so actually the firstdrug was already working on and
I would say, my, my, my child,so to speak, as in this is the
original science by which thecompany was founded.
Is this idea that we all acceptthat if you love Bernie's
Mountain Dogs or you love GreatDanes or even Rotties like me,
that you just have to acceptthat these dogs live much
(40:54):
shorter lifespans, right?
They can, at the extreme, live.
Great Dane will sometimes livelike six, seven, eight years.
Six, seven, eight years versusif you'd be fortunate enough to
be a chihuahua person or a minipoodle person, you're
potentially getting 17 yearswith your dog and we all think
this is natural, but it'sactually really weird if you
kind of step back and thinkabout it.
(41:17):
Yeah, stupid I hate it is stupid.
I definitely hate it too.
Sorry about that, selena, Ijust get frustrated no, I
literally agree, I'm, you know,I love all dogs, but I am a big
dog person, I will admit it.
I we had an off-site with theteam because we're a fully
remote company and everybodyflew in and we said bring your
dogs, but of course, only peoplewho bring their dogs or people
(41:39):
who had small dogs so they couldfly with them yeah and it was
so funny because the team waslike selene, you have so much
big dog energy, you're scaringour small dog because you can't
pet a chihuahua like you pet aroddy, like my roddy, I like
smack her butt and like togglewith her.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
My gushy faces you squish yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
You don't do that with a chihuahua.
The chihuahua was like what thehell runs away.
So it was.
Yeah, I was like, oh god, Igotta get better at this, gotta
get some more small dog energyin me.
But any, if you look at mammals, like on average, actually,
usually the larger an animal is,the longer their lifespan is.
So then the mouse will live twoyears, while even rats live
(42:20):
longer than mice, elephants liveinto the decades, whales live
into the decades and there's nospecies where you see a 2x
difference in average lifespan.
So I'm pretty short.
I'm not living twice as long assomebody who's six foot or six
foot five.
Long story short, the kind ofaha moment for Loyal is that
when we selectively bred tocreate these dog breeds since
(42:43):
all dog breeds are artificial,right, they are creations of
humans and we did this byinbreeding in most cases, not
because people are bad orwhatever, just because they
didn't know like they wereinbreeding themselves.
This was hundreds of years ago.
They're inbreeding themselvesand they're inbreeding their
cattle and they're inbreedingtheir dogs and this was super
effective to turn thedomesticated wolf mutt dog into
(43:07):
the poodle and the Germanshepherd and the Bernese
mountain dog and the hugephenotypic diversity we see in
dogs today, but unfortunately italso caused a lot of genetic
issues.
Great Danes get or sorry, sorrygerman shepherds get hip
dysplasia.
Bully breeds really strugglewith the breathing if they have
the flat faces.
Goldens gets yeah exactly,goldens get a certain form of
(43:32):
cancer at a much higher rateclean cancer.
You're right, yeah yep, and it'ssuper terrible because you just
you don't know it's there untilthey basically die of it that's
what happened to our goldenbefore Bunsen.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
God, I'm sorry.
No, it's golden.
The owners know about it.
Yeah, you bet.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, it's horrible.
And anyhow, the initial thesisof the company was hey, what if
the short lifespan of big dogsisn't normal, isn't natural,
isn't inherent?
But it's actually a geneticallyassociated accelerated aging
disease that we accidentallygave dogs when we were
selectively breeding them forsize, right, because if you pick
the puppy that grows really bigin puberty and you're like, oh,
(44:07):
that puppy, okay, breed it tothe other big puppy, you're not
following that dog to be like,oh, what happened to the puppy
that grew really fast in puberty, to see how they were at age
seven?
And it turns out that basicallygenetic pathways that cause a
dog to grow and double in sizereally quickly in puberty also
control rate of aging.
And these pathways exist in us.
(44:29):
They exist in all mammals, butin not dogs.
These genes, these kind ofgrowth hormones, turn down quite
a bit once the animal's fullygrown.
In dogs, in big dogs they don't.
So in big dogs you're havingthese growth hormones that are
circulating in the blood andthey're telling the dog grow,
divide, grow, divide.
And that means the dog'sgetting really big in puberty.
But then once a dog is fullygrown from a skeletal
(44:51):
perspective, those growthhormones are still circulating
around and they're telling thedog's body now okay, still got
to divide, still got to divide,and these dogs are literally
turning over from a metabolicperspective, at the extreme of
2x faster rate.
So, long story short, you'rejust seeing that these big dogs
are just, they have a compressedlifespan, they're aging at a
faster rate, and so the thesisof the drug, which has also
(45:13):
gotten this kind of preliminaryefficacy approval from the FDA,
is, once a dog is fully grown,can we turn down these levels of
growth hormone that are such ahigh concentration in big dogs
to levels that are seennaturally in dogs, but maybe a
more like an Aussie shepherd,right, a dog that has a 14 year
average lifespan instead of aseven year, and you're actually
(45:34):
able to do that pretty safelybecause it's a level that's seen
naturally in dogs anyhow.
So, yeah, we have two programswe're working on that.
One is an injectable, one's apill, and that's my pet project
personally.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Oh, my God, that is so exciting.
Sign us up for when it comesout, because we've got two
burners.
Our baby Bernoulli.
He just turned one a few daysago.
He's bigger than Bunsen now, sohe's our-.
Wow, yeah, he's bigger thanbunsen now, so he's our.
(46:05):
Wow, yeah, he's our big baby.
Yeah, I hope he lives as longas he can live.
All dogs should.
Yeah, yeah, very exciting.
So that maybe just to wrap upabout this drug slain, what's
the end date for this one?
The the lower the growth.
I don't have a snappy pun forthis big dog.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Short lifespan no good pun.
Yeah, I'm sure we can thinksomething through.
Probably 2027 is what we'reaiming towards.
Yeah, this one's a little bitfurther out, but we're I'm very
motivated personally too, so weare running as fast as we can.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, good science should not be rushed, yeah
rushed.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Yeah, you know there's a lot of safety work you
need to do.
There's a lot of justunderstanding, right, because
this is something that once thedogs are prescribed that they'll
be on it for the rest of theirlives.
So it's certainly a really highresponsibility to develop a
medicine like this so both ofthese drugs?
Speaker 1 (46:56):
when would your dog take them?
Is it like as soon as they canwhen they've hit their maturity?
That's what's.
Do you know the answer to that?
Yet I don't know.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, so we.
It depends on the profile ofthe drug, so the one that will
be approved first will be forsenior dogs of most sizes, so 10
years and up.
That's because it's targeting apathway that we think can
obviously delay rate of agingpotentially, but also have a
little bit of an acutebeneficial effect and so
starting it later can have a lotof benefit.
(47:28):
Uh, for the big dog shortlifespan it starts a lot sooner,
in part because a lot of bigdogs aren't alive at 10, but
also because it's more of apreventative mechanism, right,
it's more of a delay the rate ofthat dog's aging.
So you need to start it a bitsooner.
None of them are gonna bepuppies, or for very young dogs
gotcha.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Yeah, that makes sense.
For the big dogs, yeah, oh, howabout poor muzzle for the?
Speaker 3 (47:54):
oh god, that's horrifying how about?
Speaker 1 (47:57):
what about pupper?
Paws no.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
You should put it to your high school class.
I feel like they could nailthis.
The TikTok generation got this.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I got size mutters.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Oh my God, it's actually really funny, that's
all I got.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
That's all I got I think that's pretty good.
As we get to the end of ourchat.
Celine, one of the things weask all our guests is for a pet
story, and it can be a pet story, a current pet, a pet from your
past pet, but we love when ourguests share pet stories, so I
was wondering if you have onefor us.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
Story.
Oh man, I have a cat story.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Is that kosher?
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Oh, cats are great yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Okay, so I for the longest time only had a dog in
my adult life.
I had a lot of cats growing upand my boyfriend was very
anti-getting a cat.
I was like, come on, we need acat.
And he's like, absolutely not.
I was like, fine, whatever.
So I fly to Texas.
My family lives in Austin, I'mthere for some work thing and if
(49:04):
you're an Austin person,there's this very good burger
chain, local burger chain calledP Terry's that has like an
absolute bang in veggie burger.
So my dad picks me up from theairport it's super late, thank
God, as you'll see and I'm likeDad, I gotta get some food.
And so he picks me up and wedrive to the P Terry's chain
(49:25):
right by the airport.
As we're driving through thedrive-thru I see this little
dash across and I'm like, oh myGod.
And long story short, there wasthe world's tiniest kitten, like
the size of my not large hands,that was living under a
(49:45):
shipping container in theparking lot of this P terriers,
of this burger chain.
And this became a multi-dayordeal of trying to lure the
kitten out of the shippingcontainer.
It was super wild.
We tried burgers, I bought it aburger patty, I got it water,
he would come out, he would eat.
He was clearly starving.
Long story short, my dad, Isent him on a mission.
(50:08):
I'm like dad, you got to gofind a cat trap and he calls
everyone.
He knows he procures a cat trapin less than 12 hours, which
was amazing.
And we go back the next day andwe get the stinkiest, biggest
tin of sardines.
We put the cat trap down andthe cat jumps into it and the
(50:29):
catcher and it turns out likeliterally like a one, one pound
cat, so tiny.
But then the next issue comes,which is I'm flying home the
next day to california.
So then the entire day we havethis cat still in this cat trap,
who's like hissing like crazyand I'm eating their sardines
and then hissing and I'm likecarrying this cat trap with this
(50:50):
cat like and overall the petcodes and pet smarts and like
trying to find somebody, like ona sunday, who you need a health
certificate to fly with a cat,and I'm trying to find somebody
to like give me this healthcertificate and I'm like, I'm
like begging people.
I'm like, please, I can't leavethis cat, like I can't drop
this cat off at a shelter.
I need you to give me thegoddamn health.
(51:13):
And, long story short, this likewoman at petco is so sweet.
She sees me like begging thelike front desk person at the
like at the vet clinic in therewho clearly thinks I'm
absolutely mentally insane, andshe follows me out when I walk
out, defeated.
She's I know the perfect placeand she calls her vet clinic and
is like this woman needs helpand they open the red carpet for
(51:36):
me, they get me in the same day, within the hour, and get the
cat all of the shots that sheneeded so I could fly with her
like 12 hours later.
And I ended up naming her afterthe burger chain, after P Terry
.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
P Terry.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah, P Terry.
So I now have a chaotic teenagekitten named P Terry, who I
found in Austin.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
That is a sweet story .
Speaker 3 (52:07):
I love her more than anything.
She's so cute.
She every morning runs up to meand jumps in my arm and suckles
on my hair.
I'm guessing she was separatedfrom her mom pretty early, which
is so sad, but she's the cutest, cutest cat ever and I'm so
glad I found her in that parkinglot that's a cute story.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Do you, in hindsight, picture yourself in your
third's eye like you've got somecat that's in a cat trap and
you're like I need to get on aplane with this thing and people
are like what is wrong?
What are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (52:38):
oh my god, they literally thought I was nuts,
like I was carrying her, and thecat was dirty and mangy and
tiny and yeah, I was like alittle frantic.
I also had I was like gettingsome award at the university and
so like I had to be dressed upand at a location at a certain
time I couldn't bail on it, andso I was like trying to do all
of this before I went to theawards ceremony and I showed up
(53:01):
like looking like crap and itwas a whole thing.
But now I have the world's mostcutest chaotic kitten.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
Yeah, the, it's a cats and dogs and the pets that
we have like their lives are.
No, their lives are not cheap.
They're important creatureworld and giving that cat a
second chance and now it's gonnaknow only love and safety,
that's a pretty cool littlestory I know it breaks my heart
(53:31):
how she ended up there.
Speaker 3 (53:32):
So she's such a child .
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Honestly, I love that cat yeah, so sometimes the
difference between cats and dogsis dogs come from XXXY line and
I found this cat in behind myhouse.
That's where this cat is.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Oh yeah, the cat distribution system definitely
answered my prayers.
I didn't think it would be thischaotic distribution strategy,
but I'm here for it.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
Yeah, it's how we got our cat.
Our cat was a rescue too,ginger.
No, that's how we got our cat.
Our cat was a rescue too Ginger.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
No.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah, celine, this is the end.
Thank you so much for agreeingto be a guest on our show.
I know you are, as I have beentold, hopping from meeting to
meeting in a very busy life.
This is right up the alley ofthe science podcast and a topic
that's near and dear to theaudience that listens to the
show Possibly, probably,hopefully, extending the life of
(54:23):
the dogs in our houses that welove so much.
Speaker 3 (54:26):
Thank, you so much?
Yeah, no, thank you um.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Where can people find more information about yourself
, about loyal?
Is there a website?
Is there social media?
Speaker 3 (54:38):
yeah, loyalcom, I think is probably the best.
I'm also on twitter, celinehollywa, so if you can figure
out how to spell that, you canfollow me on twitter if it's
okay sorry x.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Oh, you can call it twitter.
Yeah, we'll have.
If it's okay with you, celine,we'll have some links in our
show notes that go to yourtwitter and that is totally fine
.
Okay, this has been a treat,and thank you so much for giving
up your time to chat with us.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
That's it for this week's show.
Thanks for coming back weekafter week to listen to the
science podcast.
Our top dogs get a shout out atthe end.
It's one of the perks ofsupporting us.
If you want to sign up, checkthe show notes.
Chris, take it away.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Amelia Fettig, rhi Oda, carol Hainel, jennifer
Challen, linnea Janik, karenChronister, vicky Otero, Christy
Walker, sarah Bram, wendy,diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin,
elizabeth Bourgeois, marianneMcNally, catherine Jordan, helen
Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois,marianne McNally, Catherine
(55:42):
Jordan, shelley Smith, lauraSteffensen, tracy Leinbach, ann
Uchida, heather Burback, kellyTracy Halberg, ben Rather,
debbie Anderson, sandy Brimer,mary Rader.
Bianca Hyde, andrew Lin, brendaClark, brianne Hawes, peggy
McKeel, holly Burge, KathyZerker, susan Wagner and Liz
Button.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
For science, empathy and cuteness.
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