Leveraging Canine Disease Models in Pharmaceutical Sciences: A One Health Path to Parallel Drug Development

Despite recent advances in biomedical research, translating preclinical findings into effective therapies remains a critical challenge, particularly for complex diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Spontaneous diseases in companion animals, especially dogs, provide a powerful, yet underutilized, bridge to human medicine. Naturally occurring cancers, neurodegenerative disorders, and cardiovascular, renal, and ocular diseases in dogs recapitulate many of the key biological and clinical features observed in humans, including shared pathophysiologic mechanisms, heterogeneous disease trajectories, and clinically relevant patterns of response and resistance to therapy. These models allow for the evaluation of novel therapies, including immunotherapies and gene-based treatments, in immunologically competent systems. The integration of patient-derived organoids with physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling provides a powerful framework for linking cellular-level drug responses to whole-organism exposure profiles, thereby enhancing mechanistic understanding of therapeutic action and improving the accuracy of translational predictions across species. To fully realize this potential, sustained investment in enabling infrastructure, standardized biobanking, and interdisciplinary training is essential to support scalable model generation, rigorous characterization, and broad dissemination across the translational research community.