Animal health is going to make us rich IMO, there is a ton of information on the internet but I actually think the presentation on alrt.com does a great job of summarizing it based on my DD. But instead of going over my thoughts on any of that, let me tell you what my personal veterinarian had to say about it because I think that paints a better picture since its from his personal experience as a vet.
I’ve known my veterinarian for many years so It’s easy to talk to him about a pet CGM, plus he is very interested in the subject because he said he sees a lot of diabetic pets and even gets referrals from other clinics. He basically told me all the same things that are already in the ALRT investor presentation, currently the way to monitor diabetic pets is to have the owner drop them off at the vet clinic at opening for a blood glucose curve which consists of drawing blood with a needle every two hours to collect 6 samples over 12 hours. He said Insulin is given to most pets twice a day 12 hours apart so the idea is that it gives them the blood sugar levels during that time.
He said that is one of the many problems with doing a blood glucose curve, there are half a dozen or more insulins that can be used and every pet reacts differently to every insulin. 12 hours isn’t even close to enough time to see the full effects of the insulins, and besides that, the readings they get are usually off because the pet gets stressed out which changes the readings. They don’t like being crated in the clinic with strangers and other animals around, but mainly they hate getting their blood drawn because of the prick of the needle and the pressure of the blood draw itself. So most of the time they have to hold the pets down with special gloves and a thick towel to draw blood without getting scratched or bitten.
He said quite candidly that the pets and pet owners hate the whole experience, and so does he and his staff. But he also said that its expensive for the pet owners, he has to charge $200-$250 and that barely leaves any profit after covering the costs of housing the pet all day along with pulling him and his staff away every two hours when they could be seeing other patients.
He said that he attended a continuing education conference a few years ago on diabetes and they said back then that using a CGM is the future. He said some veterinarians do currently use the Freestyle Libre CGM which is for humans, but that comes with a ton of problems. He said the maker (Abbott) wont support the use of their product on animals, and the only way to get one is to write a prescription to the pet owner and have them go pick it up at a pharmacy. He said he personally doesn’t use them because after the pet owner spends $60-$100 to get one, he then has to charge for his time to put it on and then again to take it off and try and go over the results. It makes it very expensive for the pet owner but it also is difficult because all the blood sugar readings it takes are on the pet owners phone so its hard for him to analyze. He also said it has to be scanned every 8 hours or you lose the readings because its not a true CGM and pet owners will forget to scan it and it throws off all the graphs and readings.
Long story short, he said the ALRT pet CGM sounded amazing and would be a game changer. He agreed with ALRTs presentation that all veterinarians would switch to using a pet CGM (ALRT said 97% from their market research) over doing the blood glucose curves in their clinic. But he also said he is quite interested in their platform because if it analyzed the readings for him that would save a ton of time and be really helpful.
Hopefully that wasn’t too long, but we talk about the ALRT pet CGM every time I bring my dog in so I’ve been able to ask him a lot of questions from doing my own research online to better understand the animal health space. I don’t post on ihub much anymore because nobody here seems to do or share any of their own due diligence, even when news comes out nobody has anything to say and there is no excitement around it so I don’t bother anymore. But I will continue to accumulate as much as I can for as long as I can before it takes off. I’ve said it a million times that even if it takes 5 years, if you see 10x returns who in their right mind wouldn’t wait?
"The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." – Warren Buffett
