A significant share of the innovation being funded and developed today is not reaching the animals, clinics, and farms it was designed for. This session brings together voices from across the value chain for an honest conversation about what is breaking in the handoff between innovation and adoption, and what it would take to fix it.

• The affordability reality: how should founders and funders think about pricing and access from day one?
• The missing veterinary voice in early-stage decision-making
• From approval to adoption: where are the biggest bottlenecks?
• Industry-academia collaboration: what would a better model look like?

Earlier detection and the expanding therapeutic toolkit present great opportunities to improve health outcomes, but this complexity also increases the need for greater collaboration between practice leaders and industry partners.

Innovation does not succeed at approval; it succeeds when it works in the clinic, supports the team and creates sustainable economics for the practice.

Panelists will discuss how practice and partner collaboration, can help…

• Manage and meet pet owner expectations and build trust

• More effectively integrate innovation into workflows and operations

• Identify the challenges for founders and industry partners in supporting adoption

HPAI costs hundreds of millions per outbreak. PRRS circulates persistently through the most biosecure swine systems in the world. The science to prevent both exists. Yet delivering solutions at a commercial scale is limited by challenges in demonstrating ROI and operational capacity.  

• How the economics of prevention need to be reframed around visible, near-term financial return rather than disease avoidance alone
• How data, diagnostics, and early detection are shifting biosecurity from reactive to preventive, and what tools are genuinely changing producer behavior
• The role of vaccination and emerging biological tools in building more resilient production systems at commercial scale
• What designing prevention systems for real operational conditions, consolidating herds, untrained workforces, and hostile environments, actually requires
• What collaboration across producers, industry, and regulators needs to look like to make progress at scale

Affordability can sometimes hide a broader conversation about identifying what’s important to the pet owner. What does the data tell us about pet owner preferences for the delivery of care?

• Communicating value and price
• Financing, insurance, wellness plans and flattening out the lifetime cost of ownership
• Capturing and using sentiment analysis
• Chronic disease management and the complexity of long term care
• Communication prior to in-clinic visits

Great science doesn't guarantee investment. Funding decisions happen based on factors that rarely make it onto slides: market validation, team composition, regulatory strategy, and business models that actually work. This panel explores what investors are really evaluating when they assess animal health opportunities.

• What separates fundable companies from well-pitched ones
• Market validation: what investors need to see before they believe the opportunity is real
• Regulatory strategy as an investment signal: how pathway choices affect risk and return
• Team composition and what investors are actually backing
• Business model scrutiny: the unit economics and revenue assumptions that get stress-tested hardest

The science to select livestock for feed efficiency, disease resilience, heat tolerance, and productivity simultaneously already exists. Genetics may represent the single greatest untapped opportunity to transform livestock production, moving from herd-level averages toward individual animal intelligence that connects breeding decisions to productivity. The barrier is not scientific. It is commercial: the architecture needed to verify, attribute, and reward genetic value across the supply chain is still being built. This session explores what unlocking that transformation requires. We will discuss:

• Why genetic value fails to translate into financial reward at producer level and what business models and data infrastructure are needed to change that
• What the shift from herd-level to individual animal management requires in terms of traceability, shared frameworks, and aligned incentives
• How fragmented systems, proprietary platforms, and misaligned stakeholder interests get overcome to create shared, verifiable value
• What downstream financial signals from processors, retailers, and buyers are needed to make producer-level genetic investment rational