How a PhD student built Canada’s first at-home horse health test

The innovation in health technologies for companion animals – dogs, cats, rabbits and birds considered pets – is growing making it easier to their human owners to access the care needed to keep their pets well.

But the same advancement is lacking for large animals, like working farm animals, due to the high costs of specialized veterinary medicine, housing and feeding, their slower physiological growth which impact developmental study and infrastructural constraints.

The equine community faces these challenges most extremely because horses are not linked to Canada’s agri-food industry, and there are no governmental grants available to fund research in equine health directly. And funding from other private sources like jockey clubs or riding associations generally only exist in the United States. Research for equine health in Canada does not have the same opportunities for progress that other animal science allows.

A PhD Student Set Out to Reimagine Equine Care in Canada

In 2019 as a PhD student at Trent University, Daniel Palberg founded Metaboly Research Group Inc. to address this lag in innovation. With a focus on data analytics, Metaboly set out to reimagine what equine care could look like and develop tools and platforms specifically targeted to the care of horses, and large animals in general.

The company offers horse owners parasitic monitoring via a kit that can be mailed back to the lab for analyzing, microbiome mapping to get a sense of gut and vaginal health, and bespoke data service to track sport performance, breeding, feed contaminants and unexplained instabilities.  “We keep this service locked at just $15 per sample,” said Palberg, which is cheaper than a round of antiparasitic drugs. “We do this to help slow down anti-parasite drug resistance, which is a growing concern in the equine community.” Ensuring testing via kits remains accessible across the country allows owners to test before a drug treatment is started to ensure drug use is actually needed.

“Metaboly now maintains the largest equine biobank in Canada, along with the country’s largest datasets on equine chemical exposure and equine microbiome data — resources that strengthen research capacity for the sector as a whole,” Palberg said.

But these achievements did not come easy. Early in the company’s work, Metaboly was constrained by two compounding issues: extremely limited funding availability for equine health research in Canada, and poor accessibility to health testing tools, particularly for horse owners in remote regions.

Mitacs Funding Unlocks Canada’s First Kit-Based Equine Health Test

Through funding provided by Mitacs eAccelerator program, the team was about to mobilize and modernize existing technology and infrastructure to meet the specific needs of the equine community.

“This work led to the deployment of Canada’s first kit-based solution for equine health testing,” Palberg said. Thanks to Metaboly’s technological developments, for the first time horse owners anywhere in the country could have their horses tested for intestinal parasites without needing lab or clinic access, or even having to drive anywhere to drop samples off. “If this gap had gone unaddressed, equine health monitoring in Canada would have remained inaccessible for owners outside major urban centres, and Canada would have continued to lag behind other countries with more established equine health infrastructure,” he added.

Going live with their first service and signing their first paying client was a major milestone for the whole team — “proof that the concept we’d built wasn’t just sound in theory, but validated by the market,” Palberg said.

The Mitacs grant also allowed the company to add to its team and further build on its biotech innovation.

“The Mitacs eAccelerate grant supported technology maturation to the point where Metaboly was able to hire two new biologists to advance the platform further.”

Daniel Palberg, Co-Founder, Metaboly Research Group Inc.

Specifically, it helped the company  develop ATLAS, “a new test platform that analyzes the equine hindgut microbiome — a direct outgrowth of the foundation this project established,” he added.

Metaboly’s technology and data advancement have not only made a different for horse owners, but anyone involved in horse care across the country – including veterinarians and researchers – thanks to the company’s biobank.

What’s Next: From Chronic Conditions to Reproductive Health

Currently, its microbiome researching is being expanded to investigate chronic conditions like laminitis, a painful condition involving the inflammation of soft tissue in a horse’s hoof, and colic. “And we’re taking on our most ambitious project yet,” Palberg said. “Mapping the microbiome of the mare reproductive tract to understand how good and bad microbes influence foal development, gestation, and overall reproductive health.”

The company’s impact on the equine community is only just beginning.