Racing's Choice on Breakthrough Research: Action or Words?

A Lexington, Kentucky-based veterinarian has assembled a scientific team that has proven in principle it can radically alter racing's drug-testing landscape while simultaneously providing a reasonably priced diagnostic tool to vastly improve overall horse health. The time frame in which the team has accomplished this work has been remarkably short, the methods by which they have secured funding to date have been ingenious, and the long-term implications for this research extend far beyond the horse world and into the realm of human medicine.

The unanswered question for the Thoroughbred industry is “Will any institutional entity within the sport step up to partner with and help to pay for what needs to be done to bring this project closer to reality?”

Nearly three years ago, in January 2015, I first interviewed Dr. David Nash, thinking he'd be a good source to flesh out a story I was working on about the development known as the equine biological passport (EBP) and its potential use as an anti-doping tool.

Nash proved to be highly quotable, with no shortage of opinions on the subject of doping, and he had and both racetrack- and science-related credibility to back up his strongly worded assertions.

Nash, now 61, grew up at Belmont Park, where his father, Joseph, trained horses for 45 years. His family's roots in both the Thoroughbred and Standardbred industries go back several generations, including a great-grandfather who bred the first winner of harness racing's Hambletonian S. In addition to his decades of private-practice experience with Thoroughbreds on major racing circuits, Nash has worked as a consultant or advisor to a number of global pharmaceutical firms, and in the 2000s he served as executive director of the industry-funded Equine Drug Research Institute.

What really stuck with me about our nearly two-hour EBP conversation that day was Nash's enthusiasm and passion for a counter plan he was trying to orchestrate in which testing for illicit drugs was just a small part of a grand vision he had for a tool that could also quickly and accurately screen for diseases and pinpoint infectious outbreaks before they raged into epidemics.

This was during the time when cobalt abuse was first being documented on a widespread basis, and regulators worldwide were scrambling for some sort of passport-like device to curtail it. There is nothing like a crisis to fuel awareness in paradigm- shifting projects, and Nash said he was fine with letting racing's performance-enhancing drug woes be the driving force behind his efforts-so long as the end result was that people come around to the idea of utilizing his diagnostic tool to further promote whole-horse wellness.

“We need to protect the health and the welfare of the horse,” Nash emphasized in 2015. “That includes preventing it from getting sick due to an infectious disease and preventing it from being tampered with by any illicit medication. I see no distinction between the two. None.”

Nash detailed the plans for his brainstorm on the condition that I omit specifics from that 2015 article. He was fearful that full disclosure would jeopardize potential funding and the cooperation of institutional partners outside the horse industry, and I honored his request. Nash was adamant that the technology already existed to turn his concept into reality, but was equally firm in his belief that in terns of both finances and outside scientific alliances, this was not a project the racing industry could pull off on its own.

“I'm not saying that there aren't people out there” working toward the development of breakthrough drug- and disease-testing mechanisms, Nash said at the time. “I'm saying that there is insufficient funding to do the work. [And] we have to work with people we normally don't, because it is in our best interest to do so.”

I hung up the phone with Nash and wrote the article (read it here). Although I believed his idea had merit, I chalked it up as another concept that sounded brilliant in practice but would probably die a slow death due to lack of funding. I knew Nash would need close to $1 million just to prove his point, and that type of money was hard to come by via traditional grants within the equine veterinary research sphere.

So you can imagine my surprise when an email from Nash landed in my inbox earlier this month. It contained a soon-to-be-published, proof-of-concept scientific paper about the very device we had discussed in 2015 and an invitation to interview Nash and the molecular biologist and electrical engineer who were among the 16 scientific collaborators from outside of the racing world Nash has been working with over the past three years to bring his idea, now dubbed PathTracker, to the working demo stage.

PathTracker is a battery-operated device that uses a disposable, one-time-use computer chip on a credit-card sized piece of plastic to identify bacteria and viruses in fluid samples swabbed from horses. The results are available in 25 minutes, and are displayed on a regular smart phone that interfaces with a portable testing unit that can be used just about anywhere.

Right now PathTracker is about two years away from being commercially available. Although it currently costs about $500 per device to make prototypes, the team believes the cost of production will come down to the point where the devices can be given away to veterinarians and the disposable testing cards will be the profitable part of the endeavor. Scientists and veterinarians will eventually be allowed to come up with their own customized screening panels that can be put on chips to test for whatever they want-including illicit drugs.

PathTracker's functionality is more fully explained in a TDN article published Oct. 12 (read it here). But for the moment, let's put that aside and focus on the clever way Nash's team went about obtaining the initial funding for this research.

Nash was taking a bottom-up approach with the racing industry when he realized that in order to bring his whole-health diagnostic tool to life within the sport he would need to focus first on testing for illicit drugs, because that's where the sense of alarm is within horse racing right now.

Similarly-and ingeniously-he mapped out a top-down strategy to coax $999,950 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is a deep-pocketed independent federal agency that promotes the overall progress of science but rarely awards grants that are exclusive to animal research.

In its appeal for funding, Nash's team widened the parameters of what PathTracker could do by emphasizing how the device could be used as a diagnostic tool on people. Horses, as outlined in the grant application, would simply be used as an animal model for respiratory disease to prove the concept could work on a far broader scale in human medicine.

The NSF was intrigued enough to hand over nearly $1 million for that initial horse-based research. Now that Nash and his team have proven the concept has merit, the possibilities are tantalizing in many directions.

Human medicine could soon have a portable diagnostic testing tool that can be used in third-world countries or in places where disasters have struck to keep life-threatening disease outbreaks in check. Horse racing could soon use that very same tool to ensure that its equine athletes aren't loaded with performance- enhancing pharmaceuticals (In fact, once PathTracker's capabilities are made known and widely adopted by regulators, just the threat of knowing there are cost-effective, wide-ranging tests that produce results in 25 minutes should be enough of a deterrent to dissuade most would-be dopers.).

And Nash, in bridging the vast spectrum between the disparate worlds of human medicine and catching racing's drug cheats, will have advanced his goal of bettering overall equine health, because he envisions PathTracker becoming a standard, everyday-use diagnostic tool carried by most Thoroughbred veterinarians.

Using 2015 as a benchmark, it's worth noting that two other anti-doping initiatives undertaken that year have made only incremental progress during the same time frame that Nash's team has accomplished its preliminary PathTracker research.

Biological passports have been adopted in human sports like cycling and track and field, but are not much closer to being implemented in horse racing, and federal legislation first introduced in 2015 and re-filed this year to establish a uniform medication program governed by USADA is also a long way from becoming reality.

Right now the PathTracker team considers itself ahead of its own development schedule with one year of funding remaining on the NSF grant. Dr. Brian Cunningham, the electrical engineer who pioneered the microfluidic chip technology that is the scientific backbone of the device, told TDN that to get to the next step in the process, “we think we need about $750,000 in one year to get it to a manufacturable, prototype stage where we could provide thousands of them into the field.”

As of Oct. 19, Nash confirmed that the team has not yet received any offers to fund this next part of the project despite numerous calls from people within the Thoroughbred community asking questions about PathTracker.

The interest in Nash's work is a nice. But talk is cheap. Action, in the form of the racing industry stepping up to collectively fund this next $750,000 development stage, is no doubt pricey. But in this case, the long-term cost of doing nothing will be far more expensive.