Whitney Taylor wasn’t sure what she’d find after Vancouver’s Wisdom Health recruited her for an early DNA panel analysis on her dog, Dexter.
A former employee of Banfield Pet Hospital and longtime enthusiast of dog agility competitions, Taylor was curious to see if Dexter matched the breed information she was given when she got him at the shelter, but she got a lot more than that. She found out Dexter had the MDR1 gene, which makes anesthesia and other drugs more potent than they would be in non-MDR1 dogs — and she also discovered everything she thought about his breed was wrong.
“I’m sort of a dog breed nerd, and I know there are a lot of genetically inherited diseases,” Taylor said. “I thought Dexter’s father was a purebred Welsh Spaniel, but when they ended up doing a blood draw and testing him, the results were very different than what we thought.”
Wisdom Health was still going by the name Mars Veterinary the handful of years ago when Dexter, who’s now 10, got his test. The company, like Banfield, is part of Mars Inc. and Mars Petcare, and also runs out of Vancouver’s Banfield Pet Hospital building. As one of the first players in that market, Wisdom Health has quietly grown into one of the largest dog and cat breed and DNA testing groups in the nation. Today, it can test for more than 250 dog breeds and 180 different genetic diseases.
“When we tested Dexter, we found he was actually 50 percent Springer Spaniel, not Welsh Spaniel, although the really big surprise was that he’s MDR1-positive,” Taylor said. “When MDR1-positive dogs receive certain drugs, they have a hard time getting rid of them. And when I took Dexter to the vet to get his teeth cleaned, he was always a wreck for 24 hours after. It turns out that’s because he couldn’t get the drugs out of his system.”
After the test results, her veterinary clinic was able to adjust Dexter’s drugs, and he was much less groggy the next time.
While Wisdom Health started off needing to do blood draws on animals, the company was soon able to switch to a less invasive cheek swab that can be mailed to customers. In the 11 years since it first launched, Wisdom Health has completed about 800,000 DNA tests for dogs, said Angela Hughes, a veterinary doctor with the company.
“Mars was originally interested in developing analyses for dogs surrounding how to best feed them, at least according to the lore I’ve heard,” Hughes said. “That was back in the mid-1990s, when Mars was looking to identify what particular dog breeds need most nutritionally. It kind of got shelved, but it stayed on the back burner until about 2004 when it started to transform into something else.”
Creating specific custom dog foods for specific breeds is something Mars Inc. is still interested in, but the company that grew out of that idea has a far different focus, she noted.
What really helped Wisdom Health find its niche was a partnership with Elaine Ostrander and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle. Ostrander, through the institute, had published a deep analysis of 85 breeds of canine DNA looking at diseases, mutations and breed comparisons in the journal Science. And Wisdom Health was able to get the exclusive worldwide licence to that pool of data, Hughes said.
“Mars stepped up and very quickly created a license agreement with Elaine Ostrander,” Hughes said. “And that was the proof of concept that you could do this for dog breeds. And then cats came later.”
The company continued to research and develop larger genetic assays that can determine even more dog breeds. The company also started testing cat DNA in 2017.
“We’ve expanded the panel to also include breeder products directed toward dog breeders and cat breeders,” Hughes said. “We don’t have a cat ancestry piece at this time, but we can look at 45 health conditions and their markers.”
For cats, the panels can detect genetic disorders and rare blood types that can be problematic in their care.
Wisdom Health began spread out across the United States, but in 2011, Mars Incorporated moved the headquarters, IT department, customer service, marketing and some of its research and development to the Banfield site in Vancouver.
The testing itself, however, is done at a third-party lab in Lincoln, Neb.
The company also has teams in the United Kingdom and Finland and has been spreading its reach internationally.
“We’re well on track to do more than 200,000 tests for dogs this year,” Hughes said. “We run about one test every two minutes. If you compare that to our first full year of operations in 2007, we did about 13,000 that year.”
The company has about 30 employees in Vancouver right now, but because it continues to grow fairly rapidly, it’s likely to go on a hiring spur sometime in the near future, Hughes said.
“We definitely will be looking to hire several more folks in the coming year or so with our growth projections,” Hughes said.
