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Over a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, Alex told Feline Business Brief why cats are the next frontier in veterinary therapeutics, how the lead clinical candidates are performing, and how The Cat Health Company plans to spend its recent US$1.2 million raise.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I think mainly because we’re cat people, both me and my co-founder [Alex Bacita]. Doesn’t mean we don’t love dogs, but we love that cats aren’t dogs. They’re easy to take care of, they have personality; they’re not always excited about you, and when you do get the cuddles, you feel proud of it. I’m definitely the cat whisperer for some reason.

But beyond that, there’s the economics. Cats have been super-neglected. There’s less crowding in the feline space, and there’s real unmet need. Cats need more healthcare services, more drugs, more clinical trials, and more attention generally.

Alex and I started thinking about a pharmaceutical R&D company in the veterinary space as early as 2020. That’s when we heard about Celine Halioua founding Loyal (she founded it in 2019), focused on longevity in dogs. We were very inspired (by Loyal), because her thesis was correct: human longevity trials take decades, but veterinary trials move much faster.

I was doing a PhD in computational drug discovery at Oxford; Alex worked in the pharma space for about a decade at Charles River Labs and LabCorp. We realised we were complementary and that we needed to start longevity research for companion animals.

Research in mice is great - we’ve basically cured all mouse diseases - but there’s no market for it. We did joke briefly about setting up “The Hamster Health Company,” but clearly cats and dogs are where the real need and scale are.

We bootstrapped for about a year, investing our own money into blood-biomarker research for aging cats. By 2024 we convinced venture investors from the pharma world that this could be a unicorn-level proposition in veterinary longevity.

PURR-1 and PURR-2 are aimed at sarcopenia: age-related muscle loss. We think there may be a label extension to chronic kidney disease for PURR-1, but right now the trial is specifically for sarcopenia. It’s easier to measure and a more affordable trial.

Sarcopenia is common across mammals, but in cats it has real consequences. Cats think they’re more agile and faster than they are, so they jump off stoves or out of trees and get injured. Younger cats have enough muscle padding to protect against fractures, but older cats lose that protection. We have a couple of therapeutics we think could remedy that loss of muscle mass - and some may also benefit kidney health.

We also have pre-clinical therapeutics oriented toward renal health, addressing hypertension and fibrosis in the kidney. And we’re investigating compounds for feline cognitive decline syndrome, which resembles human Alzheimer’s.

Right now PURR-1 is in the clinical stage. We recruited cats in April–May 2025, and by the end of May we already saw positive interim results; some cats were gaining weight. We’re expanding the cohort and doing imaging and biomarker analysis to see if the gains are truly muscle mass.

It depends on the next interim results. So far the drug appears safe, but we need to confirm the efficacy and effect size. If the benefit isn’t clinically meaningful, the cost to consumers wouldn’t make sense, and we wouldn’t submit.

If outcomes continue positive, we’ll likely apply for limited-market use approval in Europe or conditional approval with the FDA in the U.S. Things are moving in the right direction, but I’m cautious - nine out of ten drugs never reach market. Our plan is to diversify the pipeline while continuing the PURR-1 trial, aiming for maybe 100 cats in the final report.

TriviumVet’s conditional approval for a feline-cardiology drug was inspiring. There’s space now for entirely new indications - sarcopenia, chronic kidney disease (CKD), cognitive decline - where no therapies exist today.

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We’re well-funded for the diseases we’re tackling, with around 18 months of runway. We also had some high-profile Silicon Valley investors join the round, which gives us room to execute without distraction.

We’re extremely lean. In human pharma, clinical trials can cost tens of millions; ours cost hundreds of thousands. Investors often don’t believe it until we show receipts. We handle recruitment and pill development directly, working with veterinarians we know, rather than outsourcing everything to contract research organisations. That control keeps quality high and costs low.

There’s always pressure from VCs to “spend faster,” but we push back. There’s no reason to spend $7 million on a biomarker trial in cats. That’s why other companies fail - and why we’ll still be here.

(Editor’s note: The Cat Health Company raised €500,000 last year from Early Game Ventures and several business angels. The latest raise, in October 2025, was led by Portfolia’s Active Aging & Longevity Fund II, with participation from 100 Plus Capital, Early Game Ventures and prominent angel investor Alex Zhavoronkov.)

The biggest misconception is that cats are just small dogs - or small humans. They’re not. You can’t generalise across species like that.

Take sleep dysregulation research: something that works in mice often fails in humans because mice are nocturnal, and we’re diurnal. Cats are crepuscular - active at dawn and dusk - so their biology is different again. Yet people keep assuming results will translate perfectly between species!

There’s also the invisible graveyard: the millions of cats that die of “natural causes” that we just accept, the way people once accepted infectious disease before antibiotics. We shouldn’t wave that away. We can and should try new treatments. Tens of millions of cats in the future will be thankful we did.

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The Cat Health Company’s two lead treatment candidates, PURR-1 and PURR-2, target sarcopenia, or age-related muscle wasting (the company may seek a label extension to chronic kidney disease for PURR-1). According to Alex:

When it comes to humans, researchers talk about “Blue Zones”, such as Okinawa in Japan, and Italy’s Ogliastra region.

These are places where the inhabitants often live past 100, thanks to a confluence of beneficial lifestyle factors, e.g. low stress and a Mediterranean diet.

According to several studies, feline longevity also relies on several key factors:

There may be no feline equivalent of Okinawa or Sardinia, but attentive cat parents, consistent care, and safe environments form “Blue Zones” of their own.