Veterinary Researchers: Let More Money Go To The Dogs

Although $12 billion a year is spent in the U.S. for pet food and care, research funding for companion animal health falls short Three-year-old Jessie, her gums white from blood loss, was rushed, hemorrhaging and near death, to the emergency room of a Canadian hospital. Test results showed that she was suffering from massive ulcers brought on by an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medication she had been given to treat a hip condition. After a surgeon at the hospital removed the largest ulcers, another doctor, Mark Papich, prescribed Tagamet, a widely used SmithKline Beecham ulcer medication, to treat the smaller ones. After two weeks, Jessie was up on all fours again, barking at the mailman. And now, a year later, she's "her beautiful, bouncy, Great Dane self again," says Papich. "Her owners had given Jessie the [anti-inflammatory] drug thinking it could help her, but they didn't know it would hurt her," adds Papich, an associate professor of clinical pharmacology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The development of the drug Tagamet and its successful application in Jessie's case is a prime example of a not-infrequent occurrence of research originally performed on lab animals for the sake of humans that is eventually found to benefit animals as well. Today, for instance, veterinarians routinely perform prosthetic hip replacements and pacemaker implants on dogs--two procedures initially tried on dogs before they were done on humans. The sorry side of this, in the view of many scientists, is that, with rare exception, the only federally funded developments in pet animal health are the byproducts of research using animals as human models for disease or dysfunction. Many of the veterinary scientists who conduct basic research in schools throughout the United States want to see the situation improve. In the absence of federal support, private foundations, academic institutions, and industry are carrying the weight of funding pet health research in the United States. The major source of private money strictly for companion animal research is the Morris Foundation of Englewood, Colo. (The foundation's namesake is not related to the notorious cat on the TV commercials, says the group's director of information, Carol Williams.) Morris has an eight-member scientific advisory board that reviews some 300 research proposals sent to the foundation each year. The average size of a grant is $20,000 annually. The foundation has more than tripled its funding since 1983. For 1991, the Morris Foundation expects to fund $805,000 worth of research. The largest project the Morris Foundation now supports is a five-year, $750,000 study that aims to pinpoint disease genes of dogs. The foundation, the American Kennel Club, and the Orthopedic Institute for Ani- mals--which coordinates research from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan--each donates $50,000 per year to the study. The foundation's current 52 grants support studies that range from canine minute virus disease in dogs to combined immune deficiency, a recessive genetic disorder in Arabian horses. It also funds the work of Mark Papich, an investigator at Canada's Western College of Veterinary Medicine, on antiulcer medications for dogs. Antiulcer drugs were tested on dogs for safety before they were used in humans. Now Papich is investigating whether these drugs actually reduce stomach acid secretion in dogs. Since dogs vary greatly in size, Papich does dosage studies of various drugs with different breeds. "The trend in research in companion animals, as in humans, is molecular biology," says Williams. "We support research which tries to help breeders identify bad recessive traits so that an affected fetus can be aborted without losing a breeding year." Besides relying on private institutions like the Morris Foundation to sponsor companion animal research, some vet schools have established their own funds. The University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine has a Companion Animal Fund program that reviews in-house faculty grant proposals for research on pet diseases. The amount of a Companion Animal Fund grant averages $5,000 annually. "We started [the program] in 1985, giving away $80,000. Today we have $200,000 [to give]," says Don Lowe, associate dean of public programs at the UC-Davis vet school. "We continue to grow because of our active solicitation effort. For example, we suggest to friends of those who use the services of the vet hospital to send a donation instead of flowers in memory of a deceased pet. We also welcome estate gifts. Our vets also donate money from the fees which came from euthanizing pets that were beyond veterinary assistance." One of the most important results of research sponsored by the UC-Davis fund, says Lowe, was the understanding that the addition of taurine, an amino acid, to feline diets drastically reduces the incidence among cats of a heart disease called dilated cardiac myopathy. Other work the fund currently sponsors involves the treatment of diabetic dogs with encapsulated insulin surgically implanted into the animal's peritoneal lining. Besides academic support, some drug and biotechnology companies also have started pet health research programs that are showing results. About 1,000 veterinarians work for drug or food manufacturers in the commercial sector. The Nutley, N.J.-based pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. launched a Companion Animal Group in 1989, according to Alfred Wasilewski, spokesman for the group. "The company did a market study on the growing business of pet health care," says Wasilewski. "We thought that with our human product line of drugs and what we were already doing in our large animal division, we would have a good fit. So we went ahead." Already one Hoffmann-La Roche drug that was originally marketed for large animal soft tissue infection has now been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for dogs. The pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc. of Rahway, N.J., also started a companion animal research division in 1989. "We had four D.V.M.'s and Ph.D.'s then," says Harold Hafs, vice president of animal science research and development at Merck. "Today we have 15 D.V.M.'s and Ph.D.'s working on companion animal research." Hafs expects that one human drug, Vasotec, which is effective against congestive heart disease, will be available for dogs in 1994. In late October, Cambridge Biotech Corp. of Worcester, Mass., announced that it received USDA approval of a recombinant vaccine against feline leukemia, a leading killer of cats. This vaccine is the first genetically engineered vaccine to be used against a retroviral disease in animals. The drug companies also sponsor clinical trials of veterinary products at the vet schools, as do some of the pet food manufacturers. Ralston Purina Co. of St. Louis, for example, does most of its nutritional research in-house--it has 1,000 dogs and 800 cats, one of the oldest and largest facilties of its kind in the U.S., according to Patrick Farrell, a company spokesman. "But occasionally we fund research at the vet schools, as long as we see that no invasive or surgical techniques are employed as part of that research," says Farrell. Some pet food companies, however, have cut back on their extramural research programs. ALPO Pet-foods Inc. of Allentown, Pa., disbanded its three-year postdoctoral fellowship program for vets who do nutrition-related research last year. And a spokesman at Nabisco Foods Co. of Parsippany, N.J., which is currently trying to sell its Milk-Bone division, says, "There is no chance we are expanding research." --R.E. Although saving the life or easing the pain of dogs, cats, and other so-called companion animals is by no means a priority concern among funding administrators in general, it certainly is with these scientists, not to mention the millions of U.S. pet owners. The scientists offer economic, social, and biological reasons for increased government funding to directly aid companion animals--funding that currently doesn't exist. They argue, for example, that since pet owners fuel the economy with the billions of dollars a year they spend on feeding their animals and providing them with medical care, it is reasonable that the federal government ought to serve up more than table scraps of research funding. They contend that, while important pet health research is being done under the sponsorship of private foundations, academic institutions, and drug and biotech companies, these financial sources just aren't enough to support adequate research. The most significant disadvantage to omitting pet research from the federal funding stream, they say, is that standard research aimed at humans using animal trials offers no insight into illnesses unique to animals. "Gastric dilation problems in dogs has no comparable disease in humans," says John Bowen, associate dean for research and graduate affairs at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine in Athens. "Stone formation in the male tomcat is unique to felines. Some parasitic and infectious diseases often only affect animals." Research that uses animal subjects but is targeted at human beings simply overlooks these ailments, he says. In 1989, federal and state governments, industry, and private groups gave $175 million for research at all of the 27 veterinary schools in the U.S. (see chart on page 11). "Usually the federal money for companion animals is linked to human research," says Douglas McGregor, research administrator at the New York State College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y. And much of the money for the vet schools goes to research in food animal production and health. "Companion animal researchers don't have a political constituency who stomp the halls of Congress like agricultural animals have in the [National] Cattlemen's Association or farmers," says William Hooper, executive director of the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. The $6.48 million average allocation per school must support the 5 percent of the 50,000 veterinarians, as well as 181 Ph.D.'s, in the U.S. who do academic research. "Some schools have larger research budgets; others average much lower and are in desperate straits to get funding to do any kind of research," says Hooper. The money, he points out, has to pay for research costs, salaries, support staff, space, and overhead. But very few of these 2,681 veterinarians or Ph.D.'s do or can do research on companion animals exclusively. Franklin Loew, dean of Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, Mass., agrees that pets deserve more federal research money. He cites the economic and social role that pets play in American lives to underscore his plea for increased funding support on their behalf. "Americans have an abiding relationship with their pets," he says. "There are 110 million cats and dogs in the U.S.--that is more cats and dogs than men over the age of 18. And Americans spent $7 billion on pet food in 1989. Moreover, there is all sorts of evidence that animal companionship benefits people--from alleviating loneliness in the elderly to helping heart attack victims recover." Americans also spend another $5 billion to $8 billion a year on medical care for their cats and dogs, according to Loew. "But somehow, we as a society still think that pet ownership is frivolous," says Loew. "Why is it easier to justify research on self-induced illnesses that result from smoking rather than spend money on pets? I think it's wrong. Pet ownership is not [exclusively] the province of degenerate yuppie urban Easterners. "Only 2 percent of Americans today live on farms. And 75 percent of all vets in this country are in companion animal practice. Resources allocated to companion animals should be no less important than money allocated to food animals." Has Congress responded at all to demands from pet health researchers for more money? Not really, according to Marcia Brody, senior policy analyst for the American Veterinary Medical Association, the professional organization of the nation's veterinarians, based in Schaumburg, Ill. "This past session, though, legislators kept in an oblique reference to companion animals in the farm bill," she says, "and maybe someday that recognition could be built into a funding stream. As part of our lobbying efforts we keep trying to insert something that will refer to companion animals, but they keep taking it out." The section of the 1991 farm bill to which Brody refers authorizes the establishment of a future, as yet unfunded, program dedicated to enhancing the research capabilities of vet schools. That's just not enough, say those seeking more federal support for pet health research. The University of Georgia's Bowen has proposed the establishment of a National Institute for Companion Animal Health Research. He met last November with representatives from the American Humane Association about his idea for an institute that would coordinate review and funding of companion animal research proposals. "They were interested," he says. They are aware, says Bowen, that "state funding for companion animal research is almost nonexistent. [And] funding for agricultural animal research by the United States Department of Agriculture is so limited, it is impossible to consider these funds for funding companion animal research since they are inadequate for food animal research at the time. "We're still kicking around whether such an institute would be administered through the NIH or the USDA. I plan to keep gathering more information so that by 1995, when the farm bill is up for renewal, we might have a better chance of success." Given the dearth of resources for pet health research, how do the Ph.D.'s and the vets manage to do these kinds of studies? "Well, it's always a challenge," says Douglas McGregor, New York State vet college administrator. Besides relying on private institutions such as the Morris Foundation of Englewood, Colo.--the main source of private money for this research--some veterinary schools have established their own funds. Drug and biotech companies are also doing their own research into companion animal health (see accompanying story). Scientists who research pet health may feel the funding crunch more acutely than their colleagues in other scientific disciplines, but they continue to be dedicated to the creatures they are trying to help. "I do research to benefit animals--there's enough to keep me busy in this endeavor," says Papich, Great Dane Jessie's doctor. "And when I work with puppies, I always find homes for them afterward." Bowen, the man behind the idea of establishing a National Institute of Companion Animal Health, is trying to extend this dedication to the health of pets from scientists to nonscientists. "It's amazing how many congressional staff members keep pets," he says. "George and Barbara Bush, like many other Americans who cherish their pets, like to be photographed with them for shots in magazines and newspapers. "As a political base for lobbying, I'm trying to get all these people together."

Veterinary Researchers: Let More Money Go To The Dogs

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