The One Health Approach views the world as an integrated community – one where the health of the environment and animals influences the health of humans, and where the actions of humans impact the health of animals and the environment. While disease, pollution and environmental catastrophes often make it easy to observe the negative effects produces by this interconnectivity, it is equally important to note the positives that can be generated from these tight relationships.

Kristy Richards, Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) with a joint appointment at Weill Cornell Medical College, is working to bridge the gap between veterinary and human medicine in the hopes of discovering better treatments for lymphoma, a group of blood cancers that develop in the lymphatic system. There are an estimated 761,659 people living with, or in remission from, lymphoma in the United States. Lymphoma also impacts dogs, where the disease is not only prevalent, but typically has worse outcomes than in humans.

By studying lymphoma and possible treatments using dog models, Dr. Richards hopes to speed the development of clinical treatments that may be used in humans. Richards is co-leading her study with Drs. Angela McCleary-Wheeler, Margaret McEntee, Cheryl Balkman, Kelly Hume, and Lindsay Thalheim, partnering research at the CVM with Weill. In a recent interview about their work, Richards said she has found that exploring the similarities between trials in dogs and humans is a great way to learn. Richards explains:

“By doing co-clinical trials, you can learn a lot of things that you couldn’t learn by doing trials in a single organism alone. You can learn about shared mutations that exist in both dogs and humans that might predict responses to drugs and you can identity those more easily by comparing across species.

“Cornell is really perfectly poised for this. It has both a top notch veterinary school in Ithaca, NY, and it has world class clinical trials and basic and translational research at Weill Cornell in human lymphoma research. It really is a win-win situation for both dogs and humans because both will benefit from the research that’s going on.”

Richards and her research colleagues are integrating expertise from a variety of backgrounds to confront a serious health issue that affects many species, canines and humans included. Her research and the CVM-Weill partnership have been highlighted in the July 2015 edition of ‘Scopes and in a February 2015 post on the Lymphoma Program at NYP & Weill Cornell blog site. Richards explains further in a March 2016 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“I love the fact that the [dogs] benefit from the research, but my primary motivation is that I want to cure people with lymphoma… [With dogs] they relapse faster, the kinetics of their disease are faster, we can take biopsies easier.” 

In true One Health fashion, Richards’ studies will speed up the discovery and use of innovative solutions to health problems affecting both people and dogs.

This article was written by Cecelia Madsen.