INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
DECEMBER 7, 2013
StableLab on the rise
by Kelsey Riley
In June, Irish entrepreneur Heinrich Anhold put five years of research and development on the line when he launched StableLab, the first handheld blood test for equines. With StableLab, horse people would
for the first time be able to detect infection within minutes while at the horse’s side,
eliminating the need for time-consuming and costly lab reports. Furthermore,
through the identification of Serum Amyloid A (SAA), a protein produced
by the liver to carry immune cells to the source of inflammation, users of StableLab would be able to detect and monitor infection before the horse
started to show outward signs.
For these reasons, StableLab has been an intriguing
revolution for both racing stables and stud farms. The results and growth since
the company’s launch just five months ago, however, has been beyond even
the ambitious Anhold’s wildest imagination.
“People are getting a lot more excited about the results
than we expected,” Anhold explained. “There’s been a few
interesting things that have come out of our case studies so far, which has really
helped us a lot.”
For the next four days, Anhold will be on hand at the
American Association of Equine Practitioners Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee,
where Hagyards Equine Medical Institute and Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital will feature StableLab at their booths, in addition to presenting the compelling results of a series
of case studies conducted since the summer.
Anhold explained that partnerships with Lexington, Kentucky’s,
two largest veterinary hospitals has been key in uncovering some exciting new uses of
StableLab.
“We’ve run 120 properly controlled case studies, and
what we’ve seen is that the marker we use, SAA, responds much more aggressively to infection
inflammation, and responds not very often in non-infection inflammation,” Anhold said.
“That’s a big surprise, because it was previously just an inflammatory response, and now what we
actually have is a marker of infection. It means you can be much more specific in
diagnosing what’s wrong with the horse, and in understanding if the horse needs antibiotics or not.
“What we’ve also seen is that tests respond very rapidly in response to infection, and stay
elevated until the infection clears. That means the hospitals can use it to monitor if antibiotic
treatment is working or not. People are getting very excited about having a blood test that can do
that, because no other blood test has ever done that before.”
Anhold also noted that StableLab, already popular in
training yards for monitoring the health of racehorses, has been widely adopted on stud farms for
the purpose of detecting diseases in young foals, which can prove lethal before outward signs
are apparent.
“The breeding farms are starting to use this as a
screening tool for diseases like rhodococcus,” he said. “This is
something very new to be able to use it as a proper screening tool, not to
just keep an eye on foals and hope that you spot something in time.
This is something that can be used as part of a routine to really
control disease outbreak, and really understand what’s happening.”
The demand for StableLab has been such that its users
are now requesting a service rather than simply a product, Anhold
said. Therefore, in the near future, the company will begin
offering its clientele comprehensive reports to interpret the results of the tests, including
recommendations on its use and comparison of disease outbreak to other stud farms or
training yards in the area.
“It’s going in a lot of directions at the minute, and
they’re all going really well,” Anhold declared. “It’s just been a tremendous start for us, so we’ve been
very lucky. We had a product, we let it out there, and it’s starting to create new markets and
new systems for people.”