🤝 Thai Union's i-Tail paid $160M, about 2.3x sales, for U.S. treat maker Phelps
💊 PetLabCo took its Amazon bestseller into all 1,500+ PetSmart stores
🦷 Oxyfresh bets cats will drink what they won't let you brush, now in every PetSmart
👴 42% of pet owners would delay retirement for an aging pet, per Doubtless
💉 A vet-founded home lab is testing a needle-free heartworm screen in 52 cities
🏪 A vet who ran Banfield franchises signed for 20 Scenthound units in Raleigh and Richmond
🤖 A San Francisco startup hired $20/hour robot dog walkers because AI can't steer them yet
🛏️ The guy who put his dog on peptides is now building a red-light dog bed with PEMF
🏛️ San Francisco wants owners to buy a $200 breeding permit for any dog
⚖️ LA says a celebrity-favored dog rescue is an illegal commercial enterprise
In the same week this month, one startup raised $200M to clone and gene-edit military working dogs and another raised $5M to license human cancer drugs for dogs and cats.
Warhound sells to the military and Familiar is building drugs for pets, yet both bets assume the next big gains in dog health come out of a lab. We wanted to see whether the rest of the market agrees, so we pulled four datasets that each track a different part of the business:
Research papers on dogs and cats indexed on PubMed since 2015
Every original FDA approval for a dog drug since 2015, plus the USDA list of licensed dog biologics
22,121 US pet patents
145,539 US pet trademarks, of which 10,711 cover a pet health product
The research and the regulators moved toward hard, expensive science. The brand filings moved the other way, into supplements.
The research left general practice behind
PubMed indexed 6,847 papers about dogs in 2015 and 8,917 in 2025, up 30%. A handful of topics grew far faster and took a bigger slice of all dog research, per our count of PubMed records:
Dog aging and longevity - 82 papers to 201, from 1.2% of dog papers to 2.25%
Dog microbiome - 21 to 124, from 0.3% to 1.4%
Dog cancer immunotherapy - 29 to 107, from 0.4% to 1.2%
Dog cognition and dementia - 38 to 94, from 0.55% to 1.05%
Dog Aging Project - 0 papers in 2015, 26 in 2025
Those 4 topics grew 9% to 19% a year, against 2.7% a year for dog research overall.
2026 has already logged 191 aging papers with 2 months left. Papers on epigenetic aging clocks hit 36 this year, against 28 in all of 2025, led by a study in Science on October 8th that showed why big dogs age faster at the level of their DNA. It came from the Dog Aging Project, a long-term study that has enrolled more than 50,000 dogs since 2018.
Cats are on the same curve. Cat aging papers grew 225% over the decade, and 2026 has already passed 2025 with 255 papers.
One area went backward. Dog cell and gene therapy papers fell 7%, which makes a $200M bet on gene-edited dogs look even lonelier.
See who owns pet health's next decade, from the patents to the clinics.
Read on for why the drug giants hold 105 of 176 pet antibody patents but 0 of 71 aging ones, how supplement brands came to out-file them on pet health trademarks, why nearly 1 in 3 new dog drugs since 2021 reached vets on conditional approval, and why animal health companies have spent about $1.05B buying 3 antibody startups.
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