Unlocking economic and medical advancement for the pet owners we serve

• Data we should start capturing and what it would mean
• Patient safety and identifying training opportunities
• Connect with pet owners
• Connect with vendors
• Measure the success of launching products
• Deciding which products should be used based on client population.

In 2025, only four of the top ten animal health companies made acquisitions, the joint lowest on record. Total M&A spend fell from $8.8bn in 2024 to $1.7bn. But while the volume of deals dropped, the quality of diligence went up. Acquirers and licensees are more selective, more data-driven, and more focused on development-stage risk than at any point in the last decade.

This session will pull back the curtain on what actually drives deal decisions in animal health: what data matters, what kills deals, and what founders and development teams need to build into their programmes from day one if they want to be acquirable, licensable, or fundable.

As antimicrobial use declines, genetic complexity rises, and labour and climate pressures mount, nutrition is shifting from a performance input to an integrated management tool across health, immunity, and resilience. The science is advancing. The barrier is proof.

ROI is difficult to demonstrate consistently across variable genetics, geographies, and production systems. The validation models needed to generate commercially credible, farm-level evidence have not been built. This session will explore where functional nutrition is creating the greatest combined value, why the commercial case remains so hard to make in real production settings, and what it takes to construct the validation frameworks that unlock adoption at scale.

Whilst lifetime value isn’t a frequently used measure of the clinic/ owner relationship, we’ll discuss the key elements required to usefully drive a long-term relationship that drives better health and financial outcomes

• Mapping the customer journey from nose to tail
• Key blockers to client centricity
• Communication engagement strategy and trust building
• Predictable revenues
• Moving to metrics that matter. Getting ahead of the lagging measure of retention
• AI guiding CSR development and the use of sentiment analysis and agentic voice
• Improving adherence and decreasing variability of care

Instead of asking whether animal health can learn from human pharma’s playbook, this session asks what structural advantages animal health has that could make AI deployment faster, cheaper, and more impactful.

Lower regulatory burden. Faster trial timelines. Lower cost of failure. Access to rich real-world data from PIMS and practice networks. A more concentrated market with fewer stakeholders. These are genuine structural advantages, and they’re being exploited by companies across the value chain, from target identification to manufacturing optimisation.