Librela: In conversation with Raw Pet Medics
I realized I never posted this podcast episode here on Substack.
There is a new treatment category of products being marketed by Pharma. They are called “biologics” and are monoclonal antibodies.
These are not antibodies the immune system makes to remove foreign substances, like viruses and bacteria, from the body. These are genetically engineered antibodies created in a lab, often in hamster ovaries. They are designed to bind to many different substances.
There is a whole slew of them in the pipeline that will be making their way to market. We have 3 of them in use in veterinary medicine at present: Cytopoint, which binds to a very specific part of the immune system to shut down allergies, and Solensia for cats and Librela for dogs, designed to bind to nerve growth factor.
These new biologics have some inherent problems, which the pharmaceutical industry has been working hard to find work-arounds. One is the high potential of these products to trigger severe reactions from the immune system. Because these are not made by the body, there is a high likelihood for the body to produce antibodies to the monoclonal antibodies, triggering a whole cascade of events, including cytokine storms, necrotizing vasculitis, complement reactions leading to autoimmune reactions and even cancers.
The possibilty and potential of such adverse effects has made even the design and implementation of human clinical trials very difficult. A clinical trial for the human version of Librela had to be aborted because it was causing a new syndrome, “rapid onset progressive arthritis” (ROPA) where patients joints were degenerating so rapidly they were having to have emergency joint replacement surgeries. Supposedly ROPA does not occur in dogs or cats, but their trials only ran for 3 months in young healthy test subjects, so who really knows.
Here is the video I did with these wild raw feeding vets from the UK. Enjoy!
For those who have dogs suffering adverse effects after receiving these injections, I will be coming out with more information.
Always do your own research and ask questions, especially when it comes to new products that are touted as “miracle game changers”, for your health and the health of your pets.