Sentience Magazine | December 2025
The Pharmacy Behind Your Vet
How V-Tech Helps Keep South Africa’s Animals Healthy
When your pet is sick, or your farm animals aren’t doing well, you think of one person first: your vet. They examine, diagnose, comfort you, and prescribe treatment. But behind many of those treatment plans is a specialised partner you seldom see – a veterinary compounding pharmacy called V-Tech. Based in Midrand and started in 2003 by two South African veterinarians, Dr Johan Oosthuyse and Dr David Gerber, V-Tech was created because there was a “desperate call” from vets for medicines that simply didn’t exist on the normal shelves. Today, V-Tech is the largest veterinary compounding pharmacy in the country, trusted by vets who work with everything from pets and horses to poultry, cattle and wildlife. Put simply: V-Tech helps your vet get the right medicine, in the right form, for the right animal – even when there isn’t a ready-made product available.
What is a “compounding” pharmacy?
Most of us are used to pharmacies that take a box off the shelf and hand it over. A compounding pharmacy is different. It creates a medicine specially made for a particular patient, on your vet’s prescription. In cases like these, your vet will work with V-Tech to have a medicine made up in the right strength and form – for example a liquid, capsule, paste, cream, shampoo or even a sterile injection. The goal is always the same: make treatment more accurate, more practical and less stressful for both animal and owner.
For animals, this is often essential. Here are a few everyday examples:
- A tiny Yorkie needs a very small dose of a tablet that only comes in a large human strength. The tablet needs to be made into a safe, accurate dose for a dog that weighs only a few kilos.
- A cat with a chronic illness flatly refuses to swallow a bitter pill. Your vet may ask for a flavoured liquid or paste that’s easier to give and more acceptable to the cat.
- A rabbit, parrot or bearded dragon needs treatment, but there is no commercial medicine available in a suitable form for that species.
- A wildlife vet needs a very specific medicine or combination for sedation or treatment of a wild animal where standard options don’t exist.
Helping pets, farm animals and wildlife
Although most people think of dogs and cats, V-Tech supports a wide range of animals. For pets, compounding is often about comfort and convenience – turning “impossible to give” medicines into something a pet will actually take, and making sure long-term treatments are safe and realistic for owners to give every day. For farmers and producers, V-Tech compounds feed and water medications for livestock, such as poultry, cattle and pigs, helping vets treat entire groups of animals effectively when needed. This is especially important when a standard product is discontinued or temporarily out of stock – V-Tech can step in so that animals don’t suddenly lose access to critical medication, and treatment doesn’t have to be stopped.
For wildlife and exotic animals, compounding can be life-saving. South Africa is known for its expertise in wildlife care, but there are very few “off-the-shelf” medicines for many wild and exotic species. V-Tech’s team of pharmacists and wildlife veterinarians works with specialist vets to develop medicines for sedation, translocation and treatment of wild animals, as well as a dedicated range for birds, small mammals, reptiles and other exotics.
Quietly protecting people too: Antibiotics and food safety
V-Tech doesn’t just make medicines – it also runs important safety programmes in partnership with vets in the poultry, beef and pork industries. Around the world, there is growing concern about bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. This problem, known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR), can affect both animals and people. V-Tech offers a surveillance programme where bacteria from farms are tested in the lab against different antibiotics to see which treatments still work best. This helps vets choose the most effective medicine and dose, instead of guessing or overusing antibiotics. V-Tech also helps monitor how antibiotics are used in feed and water. Samples are tested to make sure animals are getting the correct dose – not too little (which can encourage resistance), and not too much (which is wasteful and unnecessary). At slaughter, tissue samples are checked to ensure that any meat sold for human consumption is safe and within legal limits for residues. This is an area most members of the public will never see, but it plays an important role in keeping both animals and people safe.
Training the people who care for your animals
Another part of V-Tech’s work is education. Through the V-Tech Training Academy, the company offers training programmes to help develop the skills of its own staff and to support the wider veterinary community. These sessions focus on the art and science of compounding, quality systems, and the responsible use of medicines. By investing in training, V-Tech helps make sure that the people handling and prescribing these specialised medicines are up to date and confident in what they do – which ultimately benefits the animals under their care.
Your vet’s behind-the-scenes partner
It’s important to note that V-Tech does not replace your vet and it does not sell directly to the public. Everything it does starts with a veterinary prescription or a request from a veterinarian. Your vet remains the one who examines your animal, makes the diagnosis and decides what treatment is needed. But when that treatment calls for something that doesn’t exist in a standard box or bottle, V-Tech is often the partner your vet turns to. From making a chicken-flavoured paste for a stubborn cat, to supporting a vet working on a large broiler farm, to helping wildlife experts move and treat iconic African species, V-Tech’s work is mostly invisible to the public – yet it touches thousands of animals’ lives every day. So the next time your vet mentions a “compounded medicine”, you’ll know a bit more about what that means: a carefully made, personalised treatment, created by a veterinary pharmacy whose entire mission is to give vets better tools to care for the animals we love and depend on.
Thank you to Sentience for the feature.