How “Man’s Best Friend” is going to help us solve human disease.
In antiquity
A young Pharaoh brushed a soft rolling tear from his eye. The small resting place - a tomb beside his own - would reunite him with his old friend in the afterlife. Fine linen, a coffin from the royal treasury, incense to smooth the passage - he was given a burial fit for the greatest kings of Egypt. The limestone plaque read: "The dog which was the guard of His Majesty, Abuwtiyuw is his name." The Pharaoh loved him. He was his partner in everything.
In Space
Thousands of years later, in the chrome glare of a Soviet lab, Dr. Yazdovsky completed final preparations for a mission that would change humanity forever. As he sealed the chrome space capsule, a pair of soft paws emerged, followed by a cocked, smiling head with dappled gray-and-white fur. "Goodbye Laika," he mumbled softly. She would be the first mammal in space, piercing through the heavens to see what only the gods had seen.
She never made it back home.
For science
Dr. Banting held his breath, his eyes fixed on Dog 33 - Marjorie. She lay motionless, her chest barely rising with each shallow breath. Hours crawled by, each minute an eternity of doubt and hope. Suddenly, Marjorie's paw twitched. Then her tail. Dr. Banting leaned in, hardly daring to believe. With a soft whine, Marjorie's eyes fluttered open. She rose unsteadily, shook herself, and padded over to her water bowl. As she lapped up the water, tail wagging, Dr. Banting's eyes welled with tears. It wasn't just Marjorie he had saved - it was millions of human lives.
That chemical? Insulin. It is now the lifeblood of over 100m people worldwide.
She saved their lives.
...and beyond?
These stories, spanning time immemorial, reveal a profound truth: dogs have always been there for us. From guarding pharaohs to pioneering space travel, from laboratories to living rooms, they've been our steadfast companions, our willing helpers, our silent heroes. They've comforted us, protected us, and even saved us.
Now, as we stand on the brink of a new era in biological discovery, it's time we return the favor. It's time for us to be there for them - and maybe, they'll end up saving us too.
In the book of Genesis, we find a story that seems to mirror our modern approach to the well-being of our canine companions. Cain, in a fit of jealousy, murders his brother Abel. When God questions Cain about Abel's whereabouts, Cain responds with chilling indifference: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
These words, spoken by a man who had just taken his brother's life in haste, echo through time. They challenge us to consider our responsibilities to those closest to us. And in our modern world, who could be closer than the dogs who share our homes and hearts?
For millennia, dogs have been more than pets – they've been our brothers in arms, our faithful companions, our family. Yet, when it comes to their health and wellbeing, we often adopt Cain's attitude of feigned ignorance. We turn a blind eye to their ailments, not realizing that in doing so, we're not just failing them – we're failing ourselves.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" - Genesis 4:9
The answer, when it comes to our canine companions, should be "Yes."
Dogs – canis familiaris – have walked by our sides for over 20,000 years. They've been our hunting partners, our shepherds, our protectors. They've stood with kings and comforted paupers. They've charged into battle at our side, ventured into the cold vastness of space, and dug through rubble to rescue us from disaster.
But perhaps their most crucial role has been silent and often overlooked: they've been instrumental in helping us solve diseases. 50,000 dogs are currently held in laboratories in the US for human clinical research.
My argument is that a new era of biological discovery is upon us, and it entails not testing on our pets as we’ve done so often in the past, but testing for them. Using dogs as a target model organism for human health is the answer to that bottleneck. We owe it to them as much as we owe it to the future of our own species.
Aside from the fact that this is the least we could do for our best friends - ones which millennials are already choosing over their human counterparts - there are various fundamental reasons why I believe this is not only a good idea, but an essential endeavour for the future of mankind.
These reasons span Macroeconomic factors, privacy concerns, consumer tendencies, and core biological concepts.
First, why do we even need biological models? 🧬
Before discussing why dogs are a great model for health - it’s important to first understand how science is done in the 21st century. Why do we need a “model” for biology at all? Several of you who are reading this might have jumped straight to the flavour of the financial year - “Doesn’t AI solve for this?”
No - it doesn’t and here’s why.
To get any treatment (drug or other) to market, several studies are mandated by regulatory bodies. These are largely broken up into two main categories: Clinical and Pre-Clinical trials.
Pre-clinical trials are the “hype machines”; the ones that have claimed that we’ve found the cure to Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes… usually in mice. These set the stage for the human trials - where we assess whether the treatment has the same impact on humans as it did on the mice (we’ll discuss why mice are bad for this below) before eventually bringing them to market at the end of Phase 3 of this multiyear process.
The reason computational methods (read: “AI”) will not solve this anytime soon, is that biology is hard. Not just “kind of” hard, or “sometimes” hard, or “chew on the back of your pen for a few minutes” hard. Biology is really, unbelievably, “rip-your-hair-out” hard. For every disease, you're wrangling with a complex set of symptoms that group together as a ‘pathology’, with hundreds of different cellular and protein level interactions. You’ve developed a medication that works in a petri dish against a target disease?
Ok great.
Now how exactly are you going to get it to that specifically diseased cell?
The reason computational methods (read: “AI”) will not solve this anytime soon, is that biology is hard. Not just “kind of” hard, or “sometimes” hard, or “chew on the back of your pen for a few minutes” hard. Biology is really, unbelievably, “rip-your-hair-out” hard.
This leads to the next biggest issue the field of biological research is facing - myopic, reductionist science. Conventional wisdom suggests that solving a problem consists of first breaking it down into its smallest, most digestible parts. This used to work for medicine but doesn’t any more. Why? Mostly because we’re targeting more complex diseases. Diseases also don’t exist in a petri dish - they exist in this massive interconnected biological universe known as the human body. That’s why dental disease has been linked to Alzheimer’s, Epstein-Barr to Schizophrenia, and COVID-19 to a yet undefined set of diseases.
In addition, while we treat diseases as binary (i.e. “sick” or “not sick”), in reality they exist on a continuous scale. We are gradually more sick, until we hit a threshold that makes us “actually” sick. In Alzheimer’s there is a pre-symptomatic phase that exists up to an estimated 10 years before we start to lose cognitive function. In cancer, the vascular scaffolding of tumors occurs way before the first lump shows up in a conventional x-ray.
To get AI to do this would require it model everything - every cell interaction, every organ connection, every viral infection, every genetic link, over an entire lifetime. AI can already help us diagnose, for example predicting breast cancer before it shows up on a scan, but it cannot yet tell us how something started. For this same reason, while I’m extremely excited by the advancements made in recent organoid developments (i.e. organs on a chip) as an improvement on in vitro tests, these will not solve the pre-clinical to clinical success rate bottleneck.
Disease is just too difficult to solve in isolation.
So, why not mice? 🐁
There are several types of animal models used in research - Zebrafish, C.Elegans, Monkeys - which all have their relevance depending on the budget and need of the project at hand. Mice & rats (aka "Murine models) are by far the most popular. So much so that there is a statue of a wise old mouse at the Institute of Genetics in Russia thanking them for their service.
These are good - but not great, especially when we’re using them as the final step before jumping into human trials. Granted, mice are significantly more complex than a culture in a petri dish, but they’re still not at all close to humans: they live significantly shorter lives, reside in sterile labs, and eat seeds and a few drops of water for a meal.
Even more jarring?
They don’t naturally get the same diseases as us. The mice that are tested in labs are either given the disease (i.e. via bacterial contamination) or genetically modified to have a similar form of the disease. Don’t believe me? Not to worry, you can buy your own genetically modified dementia mouse here (RRP: $140).
Suddenly, the fact that only 10% of all drug candidates that enter clinical trials receive FDA approval makes a lot more sense.
Ok - so why not livestock? 🐖
This is a better question, as they are ‘higher order mammals’ that seem to be around more complex environments than our sterile lab mice. They tend to have similar diets as well, and there is some alignment considering they make up a vital part of the human food chain.
However, here is where market forces and logical business sense kick in: there is no real market to solve complex diseases in livestock.
What happens if a farmer’s pig gets a tumour? Spoiler - they’re probably not bringing it to chemotherapy.
This also means that once again we don’t even know if these animals naturally get these diseases, and even if they did, we would be stuck in the same ethical conundrum as with mice - thousands slaughtered as an excuse for “hope”.
The only exception might be horses, but once again, there are so few of them out there and even fewer owners willing to spend the amounts of money we’re looking for to make any therapeutic commercially viable.
Fine - let's go straight to humans! 🧍🏻♂️
This is the natural response - after all, what better way to solve disease than in the target host themselves? Human cancer, human dementia, human diabetes, human arthritis.
Human-first for humans.
But the reality is actually much more complicated.
For starters, while the mice model doesn’t live long enough, a human model of disease actually may live too long. Take the case of dementia or diseases of ‘aging’. If we fundamentally accept that disease is multidimensional, complex, and takes time to manifest, then it follows that we should be tracking potential patients for as long as possible in order to pickup the slightest deviation in health. This makes sense to do - it is easier after all to treat cancer at stage 1 rather than a stage 4. Even better to kill it before it has time to grow. But if that’s the case, it will take us generations to solve complex diseases.
We don’t have time to waste.
Our loved ones’ bodies are currently sowing the seeds of disease that will take them away from us in the next 10-20 years. We don’t have time to track the babies born today, until they get dementia in 80+ years - that pace of development is far too slow.
Secondly, as humans we tend to care a lot about privacy. Our genetic code says a lot about us, and although many have become increasingly liberal about the type of medical data they share, it is not far-fetched to assume that malicious actors can use our own health against us. Health insurance premiums, future romantic partners, employment potential could all be at risk should the entirety of our medical data be put out in the open - even if it is eventually for the good of science.
Lastly, human studies are slow - which makes sense. For all intents and purposes, we are developing therapeutics for our own species. Before we start giving grandma a dose of a drug, we want to be sure that it won’t hurt her. After all, she may have dementia, but we still can have 10 good years with her. It also ties into ethics - while there are people who put their bodies forward for science and clinical trials, these participants tend to be lower income and hence do it in order to receive a financial payout. Furthermore, these participants are usually useful only for the earliest of clinical trials - the Phase 1 trials (known as ‘Safety’) where we ensure the drug won’t have any serious side effects on a healthy participant. This is why it can take up to 15 years to get a drug to market for humans.
This is why human biology is hard, clinical trial recruitment is long, and getting a drug to market is ridiculously expensive. It takes about $1.1b to get a new drug to commercial use.
So what’s the solution? We need a model that:
Lives long but not too long
We genuinely care about
Naturally develops the same diseases as us
Lives in our environments
and have a real commercial need (i.e. we actually want to save them).
Well as it turns out, they’ve been by our side the whole time.
Let's work with our best friends. 🐕
They’ve been by our sides for 20,000 years, and they’re the perfect answer to our growing needs for better research.
Here’s why:
They live appropriately long lives
The average canine lifespan is 10-15 years. For large dogs (or an at-risk breed such as Bernese Moutain Dogs) this can be slightly less, and for small dogs (Chihuahua, Pomeranian) slightly more. However, their lifespans sit perfectly within the window for an ideal biological model. They live short enough lives for us to measure changes in their health, but long enough for a 1-2 year life expansion to mean a lot to us. In my life, I have yet to meet a pet-parent that wouldn’t want to have their dog around and healthy for even a few more months.
They live in our environments Our pets are the ‘higher order mammals’ that have the closest links to humans. We live with them, they eat food that looks like ours (which is why pet food is marketed to human appetites and not wild animal sensibilities) - and in many cases they even sleep in our beds. The complexity of disease gets dealt a strong blow when we have a model that literally lives like a human and not like a mouse in a sterile lab.
After all - disease exists in the real world, not in isolation.
They naturally get the same diseases as us Without injecting them with pathogens, or modifying their DNA - unlike mice, our dogs get very similar diseases to us. Dogs get cancer, diabetes, obesity. They get arthritis, heart disease, sometimes even COVID-19. Autism (yup), Epilepsy, Periodontitis. Alzheimer’s? They get that too - but for now it’s called Canine Cognitive Dysfunction.
We don’t care about their privacy… Instead of making this an ethical discussion - let’s keep it simple.
If I asked for your Luna’s entire DNA in exchange for me helping to solve her cancer would you give it to me? What about if I told you that I couldn’t save her, but perhaps hundreds of future Golden Retrievers and their pet parents would be saved from the same terrible fate she faced. Wouldn’t you want to make a difference? Maybe you wouldn’t - but we’ve done 16 research trials to date, and I know for a fact that a significant proportion of pet-parents would. I would too. After all - I biohacked my dog's allergies away. Charlie was patient 0.
…but we do care about them. A lot.
We can keep this part of the discussion quantitative if you’d like.
We can start off with the fact that there are more dogs (80m) than kids (74m) in the US. Or that more money was spent on pet care ($186B) than on child care in 2023.
Or that the pet-market is growing 11% yearly - 2x faster than overall consumer spend.
Or that the revenues of huge food companies are being driven by their pet food sales. Or that the massive PE shop KKR owns hundreds of veterinary clinics in the US alone. Or that Private equity investment in the pet sector as a whole surged 659% in 2023. Alternatively we can focus on the emotional: 69% of millennials consider their pets as part of the family. 85% confirmed that their pets helped them through chronic loneliness. Petcare even grew during the past two recessions. Petcare is not only inelastic - it’s inelastic and growing. There is, for the first time in human history a deep alignment with our pets: a commercial need that matches our scientific needs. Add to this the fact that the FDA currently has an accelerated pathway for veterinary drugs - and you have the most robust bull case biotech has ever encountered. A perfect storm of macroeconomic factors, high spend, commercial alignment, and human advancement. Dogs are the future of biotech.
The Pet market is larger than the child care market, would you argue that we should stop funding paediatric treatments too?
Where do we go from here? Treat 🐶
What I propose isn’t entirely new. Those estimated 50,000 clinical trial lab dogs are tested used for human drugs, not pet treatments. These dogs live in kennels, treated more like lab rats than the Charlies, Lunas, or Cookies we know and love. This is not what I'm advocating.
What we do need is an ethical way to conduct pet trials - not testing on pets, but rather testing for pets. A solution that can achieve these aims will not only be better for them, but also better for commercial biotech as a whole.
Imagine a world where pet parents get early access to treatments that could save their furry family members. A world where these treatments accelerate biotech development, eventually solving human diseases. This isn't just alignment – it's symbiosis.
Imagine a world where drugs that work on diseases for our pets first act as the gateway for revolutions in human medicine. The same way Marjorie was the first to receive a dose of Insulin and Laika was the first to take a breath in outer space.
This is Treat’s manifesto. A decentralised way to conduct pet-first trials.
We believe that the future of humanity has always been by our side.
Yes, we are our "brother's keeper" - it just turns out that our brothers have four legs and wet noses.
Sign up your pet. Join the pack. For all man/kind.
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