9 May 2025
“Science Impact Report: Pets, Purpose and Progress: Synergising Research and Clinical Excellence” aims to showcase company’s global contributions to veterinary science last year.
James Westgate
Job Title
Mars Veterinary Health has released its first science impact report.
The “Science Impact Report: Pets, Purpose and Progress: Synergising Research and Clinical Excellence”, which comes just months after Mars published its inaugural sustainability update, aims to showcase the company’s global contributions to veterinary science in 2024.
Mars owns brands including AniCura, Banfield Pet Hospital, BluePearl Pet Hospital, VCA Animal Hospitals and Linnaeus in the UK, and the report features peer-review publications authored by clinicians working at some of the 3,000 practices it owns globally.
Highlights include studies focused on the concept of one health – including manuscripts on COVID and pharmaceutical stewardship – as well as work focused on topics including FIP, canine osteoarthritis, age-related changes in cats and body condition scoring.
The report also features details of clinical trials in more than 140 locations across Mars Veterinary Health’s connected network, including clinical study sites in the US and Europe.
Mars-owned vet practices recorded 35 million pet visits worldwide last year alone, and global chief medical officer Molly McAllister believes the unprecedented scale and scope of the report means it will be of benefit to veterinary professionals everywhere.
Speaking to Vet Times following the launch of the report at a symposium hosted last month in France by Mars-owned Royal Canin, Dr McAllister said: “This being the first report, we truly are at the start of the journey of bringing our businesses, our hospitals and practices all together to see what’s possible when we look to advance veterinary science.
“Across our family of practices, we employ more than 70,000 veterinary professionals and we see millions of pets every year, and there is a huge opportunity for us to leverage all that data and share the research insights generated by our clinicians with the wider profession.
“Through this report, we can really support the advancement of care across a variety of clinics in which care is delivered – from India to Singapore and London to New York City.”
Dr McAllister went on to explain how the inaugural report is likely to shape future research across its estate.
She added: “Our next step is to really dig into some of those critical areas from the standpoint of the broad, general veterinary population, or the client experience, and then target and intentionally start research projects – particularly database research projects that we can do more quickly, so we can generate insights that will be applicable to a large part of the population.”
One of the other key areas of development is the Mars Petcare Biobank, a study of clinical, genetic, and lifestyle data into which the company hopes to enrol 20,000 dogs and cats.
Dr McAllister believes it has the potential to become the largest resource of its kind.
She said: “The Biobank is hugely exciting and it is a project that we have worked very hard to bring to life.
“It is one of the few biobanks that exist in veterinary medicine, and I believe it will be the largest by the time we’ve achieved our goals.
“The aim is to use the data to enable us to start predicting and preventing disease in animals more effectively and more quickly, and shifting the focus from treating disease to preventing it.”
The report is available at the Mars Veterinary Health website.
