Convergence of human and veterinary medicine: leveraging canine naturally occurring neurological disorders to develop regenerative treatments.

n recent years, large animal models of naturally occurring diseases have become increasingly studied, with the rationale that their disease attributes may better recapitulate the pathological features of corresponding human diseases as compared to induced disease models (Hoffman and Dow, 2016). Of the available naturally occurring disease models, the canine is increasingly recognized as a valuable pre- clinical animal model in translational medicine for numerous human diseases, including cancer, respiratory disease, and inflammatory disease (Kol et al., 2015; Hoffman and Dow, 2016). The canine also frequently suffers from central nervous system (CNS) disorders, such as brain and spinal cord injuries, neurodevelopmental diseases (e.g., spina bifida (SB)), and neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., inflammatory brain disease (IBD)) that have comparable pathological features to human CNS disorders (Hoffman and Dow, 2016; Song et al., 2016). Additionally, canines live in similar environmental conditions as humans and can receive long-term monitored medical care. While research-induced animal disease modeling systems are the standard in vivo approach to evaluate therapeutics, there are notable limitations, including inconsistency from natural disease in phenotypic heterogenicity, clinical and pathological features, and responsiveness to treatments. Furthermore, effective treatments are extremely underdeveloped for dogs with these conditions, and therefore many animals are left untreated or euthanized. The comparable features of canine CNS to human CNS disorders could allow the advancement of new standard care practices for companion animals, as well as provide critical insights for the development of regenerative medicine therapies for human clinical use.