Weekend Rounds is a newsletter by Obi Veterinary Education. Each week, we'll round up what's new and noteworthy across veterinary medicine - both within the Obi community and veterinary industry at large - and deliver it right to your inbox.

New and Noteworthy

Longevity is the hot place to be 

In the last week of September, longevity startup Loyal announced a

$27M dollar series A

.

Loyal

, a San Francisco startup, has plans to improve healthspan and lifespan in dogs in order to promote translational science and support similar processes in people.

Having completed a healthspan study on 500 dogs across the US, evaluating various biomarkers, Loyal is poised to take a big step forward with their new round of funding. This round, reaffirms veterinary medicine as an important part of healthcare innovation. Between this investment and the round earlier this year by

Embark

the veterinary health innovation market is seeing some big investment this year. Its a trend we love.

This week in Staff Shortages 

It is no surprise that hospital closures are making more news this week. Its like the rest of the world is slowly waking up to our reality. All it takes is a high profile clinic to make some cuts for it to hit the news. This week Colorado State University was the lucky recipient of the now ubiquitous

"holy crap a world class hospital is cutting access to care"

story.

With a veterinary shortage likely going to last years its time to start thinking about ways to change our model of care. Enter the Veterinary Professional Associate - our equivalent of a nurse practitioner. Lincoln Memorial University is not the first to float the idea, but they certainly are putting it into practice. Next year they will begin offering a Master of Veterinary Clinical Care. A 2 year program targeted at veterinary technicians looking to upgrade their skill set and credentials. This is a solution we think has legs. Why not take some of the strain of recheck appointments, and minor medical issues off our plate.

While a new degree is one way to solve this, technicians with VTS in a number of different specialties would likely also be great candidates for an expanded role in our healthcare system. Either way, we look forward to seeing what this looks like in practice.

We highly recommend reading this article on VIN for more.

September Leaderboard 

Last month Grant took home our top spot with Valerie and Christina grabbing a silver and gold medal respectively. Enjoy the hardware because October is here and we crown a new monthly learning leader in 28 days. Some new courses are dropping in a couple weeks so get a head start today!

Let us know what you'd like to see in future editions of Weekend Rounds by replying to this email.