FELINE INFECTIOUS PERITONITIS
We are concentrating on helping cats with Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) which are being treated for the disease with the anti-viral drugs Remdesivir and GS-441524 prescribed by their veterinary team.
The laboratory measures the amount of anti-viral in a cat's blood stream from a sample provided by their veterinary surgeon during health checks.
The amount of drug being given (the dose) often provides very variable blood concentrations and so some cats may receive too little drug to ensure the virus is completely cleared from their body, whilst other cats may be receiving too large a dose if they absorb it more efficiently (wasting a valuable and costly drug).
Monitoring the dose in this way is called Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (which is used by human doctors to check doses of anti-rejection drugs and antibiotics in the same way) and may help your vet to decide the most effective dose to give to your cat.
If you need more information please contact us by sending an email to the address below (click on the address)
One of our recent challenges was to use TDM to check that a specialised antibiotic, cefovecin, could be effectively used to treat Lotus, an ill Red Panda.
In Lotus's case we were quickly able to determine that the antibiotic was found to persist in her body for the whole duration of the illness and a successful outcome was ensured without upsetting Lotus (and her keepers) with too many injections.
See:- Cooke SW, Bailey TA, Jepson L, Morphew T, Cefovecin treatment of a dental abscess and associated Enterobacter cloacae infection in a Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens) utilising therapeutic drug monitoring. Vet Rec Case Rep. 2022;e475 https://doi.org/10.1002/vrc2.475
HPLC analysis
This is the equipment we use to analyse samples, a Perkin Elmer 200 series HPLC with autosampler, quat pump, column oven, DAD, degasser & TotalChrom software.