One Health is a cross-disciplinary effort aiming to improve the assessment, treatment, and prevention of disease in people and animals. An important subfield of One Health is comparative medicine, which offers the possibility to use spontaneous animal models with naturally occurring diseases for drug R&D. These animal models have unique experimental advantages, especially over the mouse, which may provide insight into previously intractable diseases. In particular, many human disorders, including cancer, diabetes mellitus, chronic enteropathies (e.g., inflammatory bowel diseases), hypertension, and congestive heart failure have well-studied clinical analogs in dogs. SMART pharmacology is committed to advancing healthcare in animals as well as humans through the use of analytical modeling.
Through state of the art mathematical modeling techniques, we seek to model drug disposition kinetics and effects in complex biological systems. We have ongoing collaboration with centers of excellence in developing systems pharmacology models for oncology, infectious diseases, neurodegeneration and chronic enteropathies.
Our group is composed of Board-Certified Veterinary Specialists in clinical and basic research, including: Pharmacology, Toxicology, Internal Medicine and Ophthalmology. We work closely with the Clinical Trial Service of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University for getting access to drug kinetic, efficacy and safety data.
There is growing concern about the limitations of rodent models with regard to recapitulation of human disease pathogenesis. Computational modeling of data from humans and animals sharing similar diseases provides an opportunity for parallel drug development in human and veterinary medicine. This ‘‘reverse translational’’ approach needs to be supported by continuing efforts to refine in silico tools that allow extrapolation of results between species.
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