Of Mice And Men WSU’s Veterinary Hospital Shares High-Tech Equipment With People, Too

In the lobby of Washington State University’s new Veterinary Teaching Hospital, an unhappy-looking bulldog, an elderly Brittany spaniel, a couple of mutts and a nervous cat await treatment.

Another time, these could be people.

Human patients from Pullman and Colfax come to the veterinary hospital two to four times a day to use WSU’s state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging machine in a program called Palouse Shared Medical Services.

Humans and animals use the equipment at different times, don’t share the same waiting area, and workers follow strict sanitation procedures.

“There isn’t that big a difference between mammals,” says Patrick Gavin, Veterinary Clinical Sciences professor. “Anatomically we may look different, but break it down, and there are a lot of similarities.”

The MRI machine is just one example of how work at the veterinary college is benefiting human patients. Research on turkey hearts may explain a deadly form of human heart disease, and studies on other animals might improve the diagnosis of tuberculosis in people.

The 6-month-old, $38 million veterinary hospital doesn’t look like most people hospitals. It looks better.

Says assistant veterinary professor Anthony Tobias, “A surgeon told me, ‘I’m not worried that my patients will see (the veterinary hospital), I’m worried that when they see it, they won’t come back to the (medical) hospital.”’

On a given day, Tobias may use the veterinary hospital’s ultra-sound to examine turkey hearts, and his wife, Alice, an X-ray technician at Pullman Memorial Hospital, may have a human client up for an MRI.

“There’s a fair amount of interest in what goes on at the veterinary hospital and some light-heartedness about it, but we have had no complaints from any of our patients about sharing the facility,” says Scott Adams, Pullman Memorial administrator. “We have probably done 200 to 250 MRI exams up there. We anticipated we would do 500 a year, and we’re going to do 600 to 700 this first year.”

The partners of Palouse Shared Medical Services are now discussing ways to let human patients to use the veterinary school’s linear accelerator for radiation treatment of cancer.

“I anticipate that will take place sometime next year,” says Adams.

Palouse Shared Medical Services represents the closest tie between human and animal medicine. But throughout the veterinary college, in everything from basic research to clinical procedures, there are links to human medicine.

Tobias’ research into dilated cardiomyopathy in turkeys may lead to a greater understanding of human heart disease. The disease, which causes a heart to enlarge and lose its efficiency, is an economic concern for poultry and dog breeders. It also occurs at a rate of about 7.5 cases per 100,000 humans.

“It is one of the most common causes of human heart transplants,” says Tobias. “In fact, one of our residents here at the veterinary hospital had a transplant because of this. Yet it is a disease about which we understand virtually nothing.”

That could change.

Tobias, 44, can induce the condition in young turkeys by adding traces of a certain drug to their food. When the disease becomes apparent, the birds are anesthetized and the heart removed. Tobias and other veterinary cardiologists study the heart muscle cells and look at molecules that make up cells.

As Tobias develops his turkey model to pinpoint differences in healthy and diseased hearts, his findings could guide new human cardiology studies. Henk Granzier, a WSU associate professor, hopes to obtain human heart tissue samples from transplant surgeries at Sacred Heart Medical Center for molecular studies this year.

Research into another bird disease at WSU may help improve diagnosis of tuberculosis in humans. Inge Eriks, assistant professor of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology, has spent three years developing a test for the microorganism that causes tuberculosis in birds. She’s interested in expanding that research to cattle and says any test she develops for that species could be manipulated to detect the human disease.

“The only diagnostic test available for humans is 30 years old. It’s the same one I had growing up,” she says. “It’s a bad test. It doesn’t work very well. It gives you a lot of false positives, and in people with suppressed immune systems, like AIDS patients, it gives false negatives, as well.”

Gavin’s efforts to treat inoperable brain tumors in dogs already are being translated into human medicine.

The new veterinary hospital allowed Gavin to complete his studies in Pullman, rather than at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y., where he had been taking his canine patients.

Dogs with tumors were injected with an element of the isotope Boron, to which other drugs had been added to make it collect in tumor tissue. A neutron beam then was directed through the dog’s skull, and the Boron underwent a fission reaction, destroying the tumor but doing little damage to surrounding tissue.

“I wanted to see if it could be done safely, and I wanted to see if it was beneficial,” says Gavin. “Those questions have been answered to the degree that it has allowed for human trials to be done at Brookhaven.”