principles and methods upon which the discipline of modern pharmacology con-
tinues to be based. What differs two centuries later is that technology allows us to
create more selective drugs, enables more rapid screening for activity and fosters
integrated mathematical analysis of all levels of biological and chemical activity. In
addition, we possess a much deeper understanding at the molecular and genomic
level of both, how drugs work and how their actions may result in toxicological as
well as pharmacological effects.
Modern developments in the science of pharmacology are based on improved
knowledge of basic mechanisms of drug action and of the molecular basis of
disease, together with an explosion of technological advances in multiple fields,
including analytical chemistry, computational sciences, molecular biology, geno-
mics and material engineering. It is the projection of these transforming technolo-
gies onto our current knowledge base that provides a realistic approach to
predicting what the discipline may well resemble in the future. We must rely on
market forces to determine whether these predictions will come to fruition.
2 Major Dynamics Affecting Veterinary Pharmacology
Several factors will determine what will emerge as new animal drug products in the
decades ahead. These factors relate to economic, societal and technological issues.
Economic and societal factors are the principal drivers in commercial decisions, as
in the absence of a market; new products will not be developed. Corporate consoli-
dation in food animal production and pharmaceutical industries, the recent occur-
rence of high profile food safety incidents (e.g. melamine adulteration of food,
Salmonella pet food contamination), the adoption of a vegetarian lifestyle by
increasing numbers of individuals, coupled with marked expansion in the size and
diversification of the companion animal market, are factors which have had a major
impact on the profitability of companion animal compared to production animal
drugs. The substitution of melamine in protein supplements, as a fraudulent source
of protein in pet foods and human infant formula in China, is a new development
which necessitated the screening of all components of pet food for so-called
economic adulterants. This need for increased chemical and microbial surveillance
is especially felt in products destined for food-producing animals and alters the
profitability of such items. Such incidents also illustrate the global connectivity, and
hence vulnerability, of food and pharmaceutical distribution systems. The reduced
regulatory cost of developing companion animal products, due to the lack of a
requirement to establish human food safety endpoints, has resulted in the develop-
ment of many more products targeted for use in small companion animal species.
Identification of the human–animal bond (Lagoni et al. 1994 ) and its relation to
ageing of the human population in developed countries further supports the deve-
lopment of many more products for small animal therapeutics.
The physiological similarities between humans and some companion animal
species (notably dogs and cats) and their disease states facilitate the identification of
New Technologies for Application to Veterinary Therapeutics 193