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Everybody knows that if you suffer from an illness, you cannot pass by the veterinary doctor for your medicine. Likewise, a dog cannot find a cure at an academic hospital. Yet when you talk about biomedical research, humans can benefit plenty from the veterinary world. And animals can benefit from human research, too. Herein lies what the global initiative of One Medicine aims to achieve.

Karin Sanders is a prime example of a researcher using One Medicine. She is a veterinary doctor, cum laude PhD laureate since May this year, and currently a postdoctoral researcher in the “Comparative and Translational Oncology” group at companion animal department at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. She uses the One Medicine concept to study Cushing’s syndrome, a collection of health problems that result from elevated levels of steroid hormones like cortisol.

“In most cases, Cushing’s syndrome is caused by a pituitary tumor,” Karin explains. “The other main cause is an adrenal tumor. It is a serious disorder, but in humans it is quite rare. That makes it difficult to study the human disease. However, dogs can get a very similar disease which is much more common. So following One Medicine, by combining research in different species that can have the same problems, I think you can really achieve synergy and both species will benefit.”

Since six months, Karin has been working as a guest researcher in the Hans Clevers group in the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. She has been trying to set up dog adrenal organoids (3D cell cultures) to better study the disease. “It was a long-standing dream of mine, sort of,” Karin says. Dog liver organoids and cat liver organoids had already been cultured in her department, “and I really wanted to make adrenal organoids as well. The benefit of culturing dog adrenal organoids is that it is easier to obtain healthy and tumor material of dogs than of humans, because it is less rare in dogs.”

“Currently, the main goal is to establish an optimal organoid culture for dogs. Then we will study if the culture conditions can be adapted to human organoids.” Both can be vital in accessing new knowledge about the disease.

It is a bit of a thin line between when you are using animals only as an animal model for human diseases and when the animals will also benefit. So I, personally, really want both species to benefit. That is my main goal.

Implemented like this, One Medicine for biomedical studies can improve research and decrease the use of laboratory animals. “It is a bit of a thin line between when you are using animals only as an animal model for human diseases and when the animals will also benefit. So I, personally, really want both species to benefit. That is my main goal.”