Why 500 Publications in One Year Actually Matters for the Cases You See Today

Here's a problem veterinary medicine has always had: by the time research gets published, reviewed, and incorporated into practice standards, the findings are often years old. The clinical questions you have today get answered (maybe) three to five years from now, after data collection, analysis, peer review, and publication.

Mars Veterinary Health's 2025 Science Impact Report demonstrates something fundamentally different: what happens when you can conduct database research on millions of pets and generate clinically relevant insights quickly enough to actually matter.

500+ peer-reviewed publications in a single year. That's not just impressive volume. That's a research infrastructure operating at a speed and scale that didn't exist in veterinary medicine a decade ago.

What Database Research Actually Means

Mars Veterinary Health's Medical Affairs Science Team has access to anonymized data from millions of annual pet visits across its global network of 3,000+ clinics. When they want to study a clinical question, they're not starting from scratch collecting data. They're analyzing data that already exists from real-world clinical practice.

That changes everything about research timelines and relevance.

Example: Let's say there's a question about adverse reactions to a common medication in cats with concurrent kidney disease. Traditional research would require designing a prospective study, enrolling patients over months or years, collecting data, analyzing results, then publishing.

Database research? Query existing medical records across thousands of clinics, identify cats with kidney disease who received the medication, analyze outcomes, control for confounding variables, and generate results in weeks or months instead of years.

The findings are clinically actionable almost immediately. And they're based on real-world practice, not the controlled conditions of a traditional clinical trial.

Why Scale Matters More Than You Think

Small sample sizes have always plagued veterinary research. A study of 47 dogs with condition X published in a peer-reviewed journal. Great, but how confident should you be that those findings apply to the Great Dane in your exam room right now?

Mars's dataset includes millions of pets. When they study canine osteoarthritis or age-related changes in cats or body condition scoring, they're analyzing thousands or tens of thousands of cases. Statistical power isn't an issue. Population diversity isn't an issue. You're seeing findings that genuinely reflect the broader pet population.

The 2025 report describes research spanning oncology, neurology, anesthesia, dermatology, infectious disease, and machine-learning applications for clinical decision support. That breadth combined with massive sample sizes means the research is addressing common clinical questions, not just rare diseases or specialty conditions.

The One Health Research Nobody Else Can Do

Mars Veterinary Health identified a novel rabies variant in the U.S. and detected a human erythroparvovirus analogue in cats in Italy. They're studying mercury exposure in veterinary practice and tracking pharmaceutical stewardship across hundreds of clinics.

This is research that requires infrastructure most institutions don't have: international networks, laboratory capabilities, epidemiological expertise, and most importantly, the scale to detect patterns that wouldn't be visible in smaller datasets.

When they conducted a point prevalence survey on antibiotic usage across 280 AniCura clinics, that's pharmacovigilance at a level that informs actual policy and practice guidelines. Individual practices can't generate that data. Academic institutions struggle to coordinate that scale of data collection. But Mars's network can do it routinely.

What This Means for Your Clinical Decisions

Here's the practical impact: Research coming out of Mars Veterinary Health is increasingly likely to be directly relevant to the cases you see because it's based on the cases they're seeing in general practice and specialty hospitals just like yours.

When you're looking for evidence to guide treatment decisions, studies based on thousands of cases from diverse practice settings are more applicable than studies based on dozens of cases from a single academic institution.

The machine-learning applications for clinical decision support mentioned in the report? That's artificial intelligence trained on millions of patient records, learning to recognize patterns that help with diagnosis and treatment planning. That technology is coming to veterinary medicine, and it's being built on Mars's dataset scale.

The Research Infrastructure Question

Mars established a dedicated Medical Affairs Science Team specifically to drive clinical studies and outcomes-based healthcare. That's a permanent research infrastructure, not a one-off project.

They're planning the Mars Petcare Biobank to enroll 20,000 dogs and cats with clinical, genetic, and lifestyle data. That will be the largest longitudinal pet health dataset ever created. The insights from that data will shape veterinary medicine for decades.

This isn't about giving Mars credit. This is about recognizing that research infrastructure at this scale changes what's possible for the profession. It changes what questions we can answer, how quickly we can answer them, and how applicable the answers are to real-world practice.

The Publications That Matter

The report mentions publications in widely-read journals: Journal of Small Animal Practice, Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, Veterinary Record. These aren't obscure specialty journals. These are publications you might actually reference when making clinical decisions.

Several of the studies are described as "the first or largest of their kind." That matters. First studies establish whether something is worth investigating further. Largest studies provide the statistical power to detect genuine effects and rule out false positives.

When Mars publishes research on topics ranging from common conditions to rare diseases, they're contributing to the evidence base you rely on. Regardless of where you practice or who you work for, that benefits you.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Corporate consolidation concentrates research capability in corporate hands. That's not inherently good or bad, but it's the reality of veterinary medicine in 2025.

Mars Veterinary Health published 500+ peer-reviewed studies because they have the infrastructure, resources, and data access to do so. Most independent practices and many academic institutions can't compete with that scale.

The question isn't whether you like corporate consolidation. The question is whether the research being produced is advancing veterinary medicine in ways that benefit patients. Based on the 2025 Science Impact Report, the answer appears to be yes.

What Vet Candy's CEO Thinks

"The uncomfortable reality is that research infrastructure is increasingly concentrated in corporate hands, and that makes a lot of veterinarians uneasy," says Dr. Jill Lopez, CEO of Vet Candy. "But here's what I tell people: when you're trying to make an evidence-based decision about the patient in front of you, you want research that's robust, recent, and actually applicable to general practice. Database research on millions of pets delivers that in ways traditional research models can't match. You can have feelings about corporate consolidation and still recognize that this research capability is advancing the profession. Both things can be true."

What You Should Actually Do

Read the research coming out of Mars's network. Cite it when it's relevant. Incorporate evidence-based findings into your practice regardless of where the research originated.

The full report is at marsveterinary.com/veterinary-science/reports/2025, and it includes information on how to access many of the published studies.

If you're making clinical decisions based on evidence, you want that evidence to be robust, recent, and relevant. Mars's research infrastructure is increasingly capable of providing all three.

That's not corporate cheerleading. That's recognizing that 500 publications in a year from data on millions of pets represents a genuine advance in veterinary research capability.

And whether you work for Mars or compete with them, that advance benefits the patients you're trying to help.

The Bottom Line

Database research on millions of pets, conducted by thousands of clinicians, producing hundreds of peer-reviewed publications annually. That's the new normal for veterinary research at scale.

It's faster, more relevant, and more statistically powerful than traditional research models. It's also increasingly concentrated in corporate hands.

Understanding both the capabilities and the implications is part of being an informed veterinarian in 2025. The research is real. The impact is significant. And it's shaping the evidence base you rely on every day.

That's worth understanding, regardless of how you feel about the corporation producing it.