Khepri

By Khepri, Inc. · New York, NY

You know the moment. The dog who used to explode off the couch when the leash came out now lifts his head, thinks about it, and stays put. The one who cleared the stairs three at a time now stands at the bottom and waits — because the climb hurts. Owners describe it the same way, again and again: “He just got old.”

He didn’t just get old. He got osteoarthritis, and it is one of the most under-treated diseases in all of veterinary medicine.

A disease we’ve been taught to accept

Osteoarthritis is the leading cause of chronic pain in dogs. Roughly one in five adult dogs shows clinical signs of it, and among dogs over eight years old, the figure climbs toward 80%. In a country with nearly 89 million pet dogs, that is tens of millions of animals living with a disease that grinds away at their joints a little more every day.

And here is the part that should make every dog lover angry: OA is not just a mobility problem. It is a pain problem, and pain changes who a dog is. Dogs in chronic pain sleep more and play less. They withdraw. They stop greeting you at the door. Veterinary behaviorists see the downstream effects clearly — reduced engagement, disrupted sleep, irritability, the canine equivalent of the flat, gray withdrawal we would call depression in a person. The bright, busy animal you brought home slowly goes quiet, and most owners never connect it to the joints.

Worse still: osteoarthritis is the leading medical reason owners elect euthanasia. When a dog can no longer stand to eat, can no longer make it outside, can no longer get up off the floor — that is very often where the story ends. OA doesn’t just steal a dog’s comfort. It steals his years.

Everything we sell treats the symptom, not the disease

Walk into any veterinary clinic today and you will be offered the same menu that existed a decade ago. Daily NSAIDs and steroids — tablets for life, with a cumulative burden on the gut, liver and kidneys. A once-monthly anti-NGF antibody injection that blocks the pain signal while the joint underneath keeps degrading. Intra-articular fillers and repeat procedures that soothe without ever touching the underlying pathology.

Every one of these manages symptoms. Not one of them stops the disease. And every one of them is a recurring cost — financial for the owner, physical for the dog — paid out month after month, forever, with the joint quietly getting worse the whole time. In fact, regulators have grown concerned enough about pure pain-blockade approaches that in 2025 the FDA updated the U.S. label of the market-leading monthly injectable, following post-market reports that included rapidly progressive joint disease. Silencing pain, it turns out, is not the same as healing a joint — and may let the damage advance unseen.

There are, today, zero approved therapies that modify the disease itself. That is the gap. That is the whole problem. And it is exactly the gap Khepri exists to close.

One vet. Eighty dogs. A different ending.

Dr. Phillip Putter, DVM, has spent his career at SpotOn Veterinary Hospital in Connecticut watching good dogs decline on the standard menu. So when a disease-modifying option became available to study, he did something most clinicians never get the chance to do: he treated the disease at its source.

Over the course of the pilot, Dr. Putter administered KHP-1 — a single-dose gene therapy — to 80 client-owned dogs with naturally occurring osteoarthritis. Not laboratory animals. Real dogs. Real families. Real, aching, slowing-down pets whose owners had run out of good options.

One injection. Into the joint. Once.

“These are dogs I know. I’ve watched them grow up in my clinic, and I’ve watched them struggle. What I saw after a single treatment wasn’t subtle — it was owners telling me their dog was acting like a puppy again, months and years later, from one injection. I’ve been practicing a long time. I have not seen anything else behave like this.”

— Dr. Phillip Putter, DVM, SpotOn Veterinary Hospital

Draft quote — pending Dr. Putter’s review and approval.

Take Benjamin, a Labrador retriever with osteoarthritis in both hips and his stifle. Before treatment, he couldn’t climb the stairs in his own house. Two weeks after a single injection, he used those stairs for the first time in four years. At two months, his owners watched him run and jump again.

That is one dog. But it happened 80 times, with the longest follow-up now stretching five years after a single dose, and — critically — no drug-related adverse events observed across the pilot. The gains didn’t fade the way a painkiller wears off between doses. They held. That durability is the signature of a therapy that is treating the disease, not just muting the alarm.

A note on the science: this is real-world clinical experience in client-owned dogs, not a controlled trial. Controlled efficacy will be established in the registrational study Khepri is now designing with the FDA. But it is precisely the kind of evidence base regulators expect a program to have before it enters formal trials — and it is why our path from here is unusually clear.

Why this matters now

For the first time, a treatment for canine osteoarthritis is aimed at the biology driving the disease rather than the pain it causes. The mechanism is elegant: chronic joint inflammation is fueled by the build-up of a lipid called ceramide, which pushes joint cells toward senescence and death, releasing yet more inflammation in a self-reinforcing loop. KHP-1 delivers the gene for the enzyme that clears ceramide — breaking the loop, letting the cells survive, and letting the joint quiet down and stay quiet.

This is disease modification. It is the difference between paying to manage a decline and actually changing its course.

Our dogs give us their entire lives. They ask for almost nothing back. In their elderly years — the years they need us most — the very least we owe them is a real attempt at treatment, not a lifetime subscription to managed suffering.

Dr. Putter’s 80 dogs are the proof that a different ending is possible. Now the work is to bring it to the other fourteen million.

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Khepri, Inc. is developing KHP-1, a single-dose gene therapy for canine osteoarthritis. Learn more at khepribio.com.

This article is for general informational and educational purposes only. KHP-1 is an investigational veterinary therapeutic and is not approved by the FDA or any regulatory authority; it is not available for commercial sale. Statements regarding pilot outcomes reflect uncontrolled, real-world clinical experience in client-owned animals and are not a substitute for controlled clinical trial data. Individual results vary. Nothing herein constitutes medical or veterinary advice.