NCSU Veterinary School is expanding its capacity to treat animals, and it’s also trying to make the most out of technologies that have applications in both human and animal health.
In an earlier Free Market Minute, I noted that many technologies that were originally designed to provide for the improved health and comfort of humans have migrated into the animal care kingdom. And now the next logical step is being implemented in North Carolina: a synergistic relationship between veterinary teaching, research, and techniques and human health care facilities. Specifically animal care techniques are migrating back into human medicine, and not just due to animal trials of potential human treatments. Veterinary research is improving human treatment as a by-product of better animal care.
The NC State Veterinary School’s new expansion program is expected to make procedures once prohibitively expensive and hard to come by available to animal owners in North Carolina and elsewhere. In the past, these veterinary advances have often come out of vet schools located in universities with their own (human) medical schools and teaching hospitals. Those schools can piggyback on the diagnostic and technological facilities of on-campus hospitals. But NC State, a non-medical school university, hopes to ally with Duke University Medical Center, WakeMed, and the UNC-Chapel Hill Hospital systems in its College of Veterinary Medicine expansion plan.
More than cows are at stake, here. Biomedical research, including that at NC State, is heavily supported by tax dollars through the National Institutes of Health and other government sources. The “market” test will come when we see whether the project can attract private firms that do not rely on government funding (or “incentives”) to be willing to conduct their research and development efforts here. Privately raised funds for the NCSU Vet School in 2002-03 amounted to $6.5 million dollars, and the College of Veterinary Medicine unit did generate a positive financial balance for the year. Nevertheless, the total multi-year project price is close to $500 million. That’s a lot of rabies shots.
As veterinary practitioners have already discovered, medical technology commonly used in humans—pacemakers, orthopaedic devices, and disease control—is becoming economically feasible, and attractive, for animal owners. But there are national security areas in which the research is likely to be applied as well. These include food supply safety and concerns about bioterrorism.
Will veterinarians soon be treating human patients as well as domestic animals? Scientists, doctors, and researchers admit that at times it is difficult to tell the difference between the care given to animals and that offered to humans. Magnetic resonance imaging and irradiation treatment of tumors are common for both.
As yet no human patients are being treated at the College of Veterinary Medicine’s clinics. The beginnings exist, however, for developing animal treatment protocols to combat debilitating diseases, including manipulating the genetic code in the molecules that control cystic fibrosis and other chronic ailments, to be transferred to human patients.
Along with all this complementary research come changes in the market options for veterinarians, and possibly for their clients. Already many veterinarians are choosing “branch” careers in food safety or disease outbreak control, rather than choosing strictly animal treatment. More vets are also pursuing doctoral degrees, and publishing in professional journals at a rate consistent with academic careers, and with traditional M.D. careers.
Given that a number of vet schools are located on campuses that also have a hospital, or are closely allied with area hospitals, will we see “crossover” medical practitioners—doctors whose specialties apply to both human and animal patients, and who offer to treat both? In large degree, of course, this will depend upon a parallel change in professional licensing agencies, and not on the market. Whether this concept will appeal to consumers is also an interesting question, one that we may get to explore as the interrelationship between animal and human medicine develops further, and demands for highly specialized procedures increase.