Interview with Olivier M. Lepage

Born in Belgium I qualified as a veterinarian at the University of Liège in 1987. I obtained a Master of Science from the University of Montreal (Canada), became Privat Dozent in 1998 from the University of Bern (Switzerland) and received habilitation to direct research from the University of Lyon (France) the following year.  All these post-graduate degrees were concentrating on researches about noninvasive assessment of equine bone. My clinical career started has a private practitioner in Belgium and France before being accepted for an Internship at the University of Montreal followed by a Residency in large animal surgery in the same institution. I became Charter Member of the European College of Veterinary Surgeons (ECVS) and in 1994 Diplomate of the same College. During my twenty one years in Academics I held positions of: Equine Surgery Clinician at the University of Montreal, Head of the equine surgery team at the University of Bern and since 2000, I am Full Professor of surgery and Director of the Equine Center at the VetAgro Sup -Veterinary Campus of Lyon (University of Lyon, France).

Since that period I also helped some NGO’s dedicated to working equids in North Africa.   A few years later, I was upset by what I could bring (and receive) by taking care of working equids in West Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). After a few a travels to better understand the needs,  I decided to create (2010) an  NGO (Afrequid) with specific objectives to be reached in these countries. But it was on the eve of a terrible destabilization, by jihadists, of an entire region inhabited by a wonderful and peaceful population. In love with the African continent, I also did six months sabbatical at the Drakenstein Veterinary Clinic specialized with Thoroughbred breeding and training problems. I was at the origin of an ECVS equine surgery alternate programme in that part of the world and I am still supervising a resident.

What or who influenced you to become a veterinarian and how old were you at that time?

We always had horses or ponies at home and from very early childhood I was naturally interested to biology and animals and definitely much more than to an officer's profession to which my father destined me.

At what stage in your career did you decide to specialise in Orthopaedic Surgery and did someone mentor you?

When you decide to become an equine veterinarian you have to realize that it is very difficult to specialize only in orthopedics at the exception of the ones working in a few equine clinical facilities in North America and in the UK. It means that I have always been involved in all type of surgeries including colic, reproductive tract surgery and upper respiratory tract surgery including a major interest in guttural pouch disease.

But compared with many of my colleagues I am immersed in the problem of equine orthopedics since many years. For this I had the incredible opportunity, during my third year of veterinary study at the University of Louvain, to cross the path of Doctor Robert François, a major Belgian rheumatologist, Director of the Research Laboratory in the matter at Brussels Military Hospital. I asked him what would be the alternative option to phenylbutazone for my horse with interphalangeal osteoarthritis. His response was to test bisphosphonates in this species and that is how I worked as a research student under his supervision during my last three years of veterinary studies. This also allowed me to get my first scientific publication the year of my graduation. It was describing an original and forerunner study on the assessment of a bisphosphonate on equine bone. But I actually realized that to continue studies on the effect of such molecules there was a need for non-invasive tools of bone and cartilage assessment to replace to a certain point the necessity of histological studies. From that moment all my publications as part of my research training addressed orthopedics, it was my time to share my results on bone biochemical markers (osteocalcin, ICTP, bALP, CTX1) and diagnostic imaging techniques such as quantitative ultrasonography (QUS) or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) applied to horses. During these Master and Doctoral days I was influenced by the encounter with other great scientists in human orthopedics such as Prof. Herbert Fleisch (University of Bern) or Francis Glorieux (McGill University, Shriners Hospitals for Children), always actively supported by my mentor in equine surgery Prof. Marcel Marcoux (University of Montreal). As you can imagine, as a veterinarian I have always been very concerned about the highly positive impact of thinking comparative medicine and that’s why I also organized in April 2014 the 1^st European Comparative Symposium on Equine and Human Sports Medicine, Rehabilitation and Traumatology under the patronage of ESVOT.

Meanwhile I served the European Society of Veterinary Orthopaedics and Traumatology (ESVOT) as Director from 2000 to 2008, as President and past president the following years. I was also actively involved in ECVS, as an Exam Committee member, annual scientific meeting organiser and still presently as an elected board regent.