Stokes Pharmacy and the Bova Group have almost parallel stories—pharmacies with retail roots that expanded into compounding to better serve a larger audience with the highest quality medications possible. Each organization has made a significant impact in the countries they serve—Stokes in the US and Bova in Australia and the United Kingdom—and they’ve both raised the bar for quality of care in veterinary medicine.
The two organizations added to their industry-changing reputations when they announced they were teaming up to bring life-saving treatment for cats with feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) to the United States. Since the announcement in June 2024 and the availability of the treatment, GS-441524, shortly after, Stokes Pharmacy has successfully treated thousands of patients. This partnership is changing the lives of pet owners and veterinarians alike, giving both a safe and trusted treatment option for cats with FIP.
How did such an impactful partnership between two veterinary compounding leaders happen? And what’s in store next for the Stokes and Bova teams? Brett Davidson, former Bova National Sales Manager in Australia and new Stokes Healthcare (Stokes and Epicur) National Equine Sales Manager, gave us an insider’s perspective on how these organizations are changing the landscape of veterinary medicine.
Brett, tell us about your previous work at Bova and a brief background about the company.
So, I worked at Bova for 16 years in Australia. I launched the expansion of the company with Nick Bova, the owner, so you could say I was employee number one, I suppose. Nick took over in 2008 after finishing his pharmacy degree. I started the same year, and we built the business in Australia from there. And then in 2017, Nick went to the UK and started that office, focusing on specialty medications for UK veterinarians. Emma Jones, Sales Director for Bova UK, was one of the first ones to help him there. And now, Bova has grown to what it is today.
Because I knew the company so well, I was a jack of all trades, but my main role was organizing my sales team and our customer relationships. I worked with a lot of corporate accounts, buying groups, larger hospitals, and specialty centers. I supported my team however was most valuable to make sure we keep our clients.
And now you’ve joined the Stokes Healthcare team! Tell us how that move came about and your new role.
It’s great here, and I’m thrilled to be part of the team. The story of how it all happened isn’t particularly exciting, ha! I noticed that Stokes Healthcare was advertising for an Equine Sales Account Manager, so I reached out to Michael Tursi to discuss the role and his vision for it. True to form, Michael was very open and accommodating, making it easy to have an honest conversation about the opportunity. Given my experience with some of the equine products that Epicur and Stokes are launching, I’m hopeful that I can help the team break into the equine market here in the U.S. I’m really enjoying this new challenge, learning a lot, and having a great time working alongside such a dedicated team.
Back to your start at Bova and the expansion – what was the vision for expanding Bova into compounding and the veterinary market?
Bova chemists had been around for years, with Nick’s dad starting the business in 1968. In Australia, a pharmacy can only be owned by a pharmacist, it can’t be owned by a group or corporate, so Nick took over the retail pharmacy after graduating from university and Bova started compounding at the same time.
At first, it wasn’t specifically for veterinary medicine, we were just doing compounding for human medicine, but we had a lot of the big box retail pharmacies starting to take over. They would buy a number of pharmacies in different locations, and then reduce their margins considerably. Being that Bova was an independent, we would have had to compete with these larger corporate types of pharmacies that are known for cutting prices. So, instead of trying to compete on a retail pharmacy level, Nick explored what else might be available. That’s when he came across compounding and decided that would be the direction he’d prefer to go in rather than trying to compete on price.
What sets Bova apart from other compounders?
In Australia, Bova built its foundations on the quality of what they do and innovation. To be honest, they are the only compounder in Australia that has continued to release new products for the veterinary industry. So, whether it’s a long-acting injection or a combination of medications for behavior or anxiety, Bova has always been first to the market with a new product. Competitors will usually follow after a year or two and release the same products.
Bova is always trying to find new ways to help treat veterinary patients, that’s how they’ve really built a reputation for innovation. I think the GS tablets are a perfect example of that. We were the only ones in the world, for a long time, that had that product, and we worked with a lot of international KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) to get it right and release it. It was amazing to be a part of.
And then, in Australia, it’s a differentiator how we focus a lot on quality. There are no kind of regulatory agencies actively monitoring pharmacies with compounding as much as they do in the US or the UK. Obviously, you still have the pharmacy councils and boards, but there’s no system in place where pharmacies or pharmacists can acquire certain licenses or approvals, like 503A or 503B in the US, to make certain products their facilities don’t have.
At Bova, we implemented our own kind of quality assurance program based on GMP guidelines, or good manufacturing practices, which is the same as the pharmaceutical standard that Epicur has to reach. So, in Australia, Bova is the only one, that I am aware of, that adheres to GMP in the country, which gives them the ability to do things like batching, quality testing, stability work, you know, all those kinds of things that the US 503B facilities do. They’re the only ones that can offer that in the country, so even though there’s no one watching and there’s no one making them do it, Bova holds themselves to a different standard.
Obviously, Bova isn’t a newcomer to the veterinary industry, but the name might be newer to US veterinarians. How will you communicate Bova’s reputation to US veterinarians?
Well, something unique Bova has done that not many compounders do, if any in the world, is a lot of work on research and development. Bova supports studies and initiatives done by KOL’s who conduct research with animals, and therefore we’ve got a lot of published data on the products that we have. If they haven’t heard of Bova, I’d jokingly say ‘Where have you been?’ being that there are dozens of published articles now where highly regarded veterinarians, both equine and companion, have done a lot of work using Bova products specifically to treat certain diseases.
One of the most exciting studies Bova supported was with Dr. Samantha Taylor, Dr. Sally Coggins, and several other esteemed veterinary professionals who studied the effectiveness of Bova’s GS-441524 formula in treating cats with FIP. The study, Retrospective study and outcome of 307 cats with feline infectious peritonitis treated with legally sourced veterinary compounded preparations of remdesivir and GS-441524 (2020-2022), resulted in one of the highest success rates with more than 80% of the cats showing a complete response to treatment. This was the biggest study for cats across various countries and changed the trajectory of FIP treatment—proving not all formulas are the same and proving successful treatment.
Those articles are a great way to introduce Bova because, especially these days, I think veterinarians want to know how well a drug works, whether it’s stable, and whether it’s safe. Years ago, you could walk into a clinic and say, ‘Hey, we’ve made this new medication. Do you want to give it a try?’ They go, ‘Sure, no worries, and we’ll give it a try.’ Whereas now we walk in with the GS tablets, for instance, and we can say here’s the product that we’ve been developing with these vets from the universities or colleges or specialty centers but then we also say here are 10 case studies on different animals where they’ve used it, and these are the outcomes.
It’s not just making medication in a compounding facility and hoping it works. It’s really about giving them the confidence that they’re dealing with someone who actually does work around their products. That’s why a big part of the Bova story is the dozens of peer-reviewed, published papers on multiple different species, for different medications. And now it’s Bova UK, Bova Aus, and Epicur/Stokes that can tell that story.
More FIP Clinical Studies to Read
How did FIP become such a strong focus for Bova?
It’s been a disease that’s been around forever. Unfortunately, there was never a cure and once the cat was diagnosed, it was pretty much a death sentence. So, it wasn’t really spoken about a lot within the industry because there wasn’t a treatment.
I suppose the good thing that came out of COVID in humans was the research into these antiviral medications. Then we started having a lot more access and a lot more information about it. We’ve got some pretty influential veterinarians in Australia who really focus on feline medicine, and they’ve done some research as well. They came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, we need to look at some of these. We have a pretty good understanding that this might actually help treat FIP.’ So, we started working with them and with wholesalers to acquire remdesivir to start learning what was possible.
That study with Dr. Samantha Taylor is where we started to show it was quite a successful treatment, with the success rate of the cat defeating the FIP going from zero to 80%. And then, like with anything, it evolved over time. The vets would do more research and come back to us with ideas they thought might work and we’d research what we could get access to through wholesalers to test and research. It was all about partnerships that we have, first in Australia, but also in the UK and hopefully in the US now, where, you know, we’re very good at making medications, but the vets are very good at researching to know what works.
And it’s a good partnership to have, where they can give us some guidelines or some areas to research for them, and then we can come back to them and say whether it’s possible to make it or whether it’s possible to find that active. Then we can kind of just start working together. We’ve done that with the remdesivir, the GS-441524, and we’re doing it for EIDD-1931 too. It’s just that continuous communication, research, and innovation to release the products if they’re effective enough to treat a certain disease. And it wasn’t just FIP. We’ve done that in different species and different drugs as well.
How did the partnership with Stokes start?
Bova’s FIP formulations launched in Australia in approximately 2021 and then shortly after in the UK, and since then Bova has sold more than half a million doses of GS tablets around the world. That, combined with the multiple clinical trials using the Bova formulation, made it clear this treatment needed to be made available to every veterinarian for patients.
Vets really didn’t have options to treat FIP and the Bova formulation met the safety and efficacy needs of prescribing medication. And so, Nick (Bova) started looking for a partner to distribute the formulation into the US. It was critical to him to find someone who took science and quality as seriously as Bova does. Nick contacted several compounding pharmacies in the US and visited the Stokes and Epicur facilities multiple times.
Stokes and Epicur fit the level of commitment and quality Nick was looking for and he knew they’d match the reputation Bova is known for. For our GS partnership specifically, Stokes is ordering all the same raw materials, active and inactive, right down to the exact same flavor used at Bova. They’ve also made tablets and sent them to Bova for quality assurance and analysis to confirm it meets the Bova specifications.
What is it about Stokes that made them the right organization to partner with and proved they matched Bova’s standards?
Stokes and Bova are obviously very similar in their missions and perspectives, so there are multiple reasons the partnership was a fit. Two main ones would be quality and reputation. It’s very important to the vision for Bova, and they hold very high standards in Australia and the UK. I think once we had done some research and looked around it was clear Stokes aligned with that reputation for innovation, exceptional quality, and being a good privately-owned business to work with.
The investment that Stokes’ leadership, including Michael Tursi and Emmett McVey, was another reason. Nick was impressed with the advanced, state-of-the-art facilities that Stokes and Epicur have, and the fact that Mike and Emmett continue to re-invest in quality and continuous improvements in the business, including achieving a 503B outsourcing licensing for Epicur. No owners do that unless they are serious about quality, which was a standout feature Nick was looking for.
I think all of those aspects tick the boxes for what Bova was looking for and if they had to set up a business within the US, it would be very similar if not exactly the same as what Stokes and Epicur already have built—with their values, their staff, their products, their facilities, and similar aspects of their business.
How will this partnership transform the landscape of feline health in the US?
Internationally, we’re now pulling our resources in a way that’s probably never been done before. Where, what we have as facilities, we can make products quickly and to an extremely high standard, but we’ve also got access to leading veterinarians and KOL specialists in any species across the world. We’ve networked everyone together. It’s no longer us working alone in Australia and trying to figure out what everyone else is doing, and the same for the UK. We’ve kind of made that triangle connection with the front runners of veterinary and feline research, medications and treatments, so we can now share our resources.
I think that’s just a very powerful tool for every country now to be able to lean on, rather than seeing what they’re doing in the US and then trying to figure out how we can get that information. Now, we can just pick up the phone and go, ‘Hey, I see you guys are doing this, or we’ve been working on this type of medication. Have you done any work before we’ve spoken to this?’ Or even ‘Do you have the same concerns in the UK, US, Australia, or anywhere else?’
That connection, I think, is unique and hasn’t been done by any compounding pharmacy yet. So, I think it brings to the table a lot of opportunities for us not just as a business, but also for the industry to combine our resources.
Stokes Pharmacy’s Bova GS-441524 has already saved thousands of cats with FIP.
Learn more about FIP, Bova GS-441524 from Stokes, and how to prescribe it for your patients.
Compounded Bova GS-441524 is available by veterinary prescription for individual patients and veterinary office use in permitted states.
