Canine Brains, Human Profits (Part 2): A short perspective piece (#466)
- Rick LeCouteur
- Dec 5, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2025
(Part 1 of Canine Brains, Human Profits was published in November 2025 here:
Veterinary neurosurgery now sits at a crossroads where clinical care, comparative oncology, and commercial innovation increasingly overlap.
Laser interstitial thermal therapy, high-frequency electroporation, and systemic mRNA platforms are no longer theoretical tools. They are being adapted, often very elegantly, for use in client-owned dogs with naturally occurring brain tumors.
These studies are rightly celebrated. They offer canine patients access to cutting-edge interventions, generate biologically rich data in a spontaneous large-animal model, and support the development of therapies for people with devastating diseases.
Everyone wins - at least in theory.
But beneath the success stories lies a structural question that our profession can no longer politely ignore:
When a veterinary hospital helps de-risk and refine a neurosurgical or immunotherapy platform for a company, who truly owns that progress?
In many of the high-profile translational papers, the answer is strikingly consistent.
The device or biotech company, often with human neurosurgical partners, holds the patents and equity.
The veterinary side provides:
The patients.
The surgical ingenuity needed to adapt human hardware to canine anatomy.
The peri-operative care and imaging.
The long-term follow-up that makes the dataset so compelling.
In return, the veterinary team receives what academia traditionally offers:
Authorship, some grant support, and
the satisfaction of doing good medicine.
Those are not trivial. But when the same datasets help secure human trials, regulatory approvals, and commercial growth, the imbalance between scientific credit and economic benefit becomes hard to ignore.
The goal, however, should not be to dismantle vet–industry collaborations.
On the contrary, done well, they are one of the most powerful engines we have for comparative neuro-oncology.
The challenge is to move from a transactional model where vets are high-end contract research providers (which I affectionately refer to as “supertechs”), to a relational model, where researchers and veterinary institutions are recognized as co-creators and co-stakeholders in the technologies their patients help validate.
What might that look like in practice?
First, at the level of governance, studies should be jointly owned from the outset.
That means:
A shared steering committee where veterinary investigators, human-medical partners, and company scientists all have a vote in study design, amendments, and publication plans.
Explicit co-PI structures, with veterinary PIs listed alongside human PIs on grants and protocols, not just in name, but in decision-making.
Second, we need more sophisticated intellectual property (IP) and field-of-use arrangements:
It is reasonable that a company owns its core platform - its laser hardware, its base pulse generator, its fundamental mRNA chemistry.
But much of what makes these platforms viable in veterinary patients are innovations born in the vet hospital: canine-specific mini-bolts, workflow adaptations for different skull conformations, imaging sequences tailored to thick temporal musculature, dosing schemas that balance efficacy with owner realities.
Those innovations should not automatically disappear into someone else’s patent portfolio.
A more equitable approach would:
Treat veterinary-specific adaptations as co-invented IP, with researchers and veterinary schools as co-owners, or
At minimum, grant the veterinary institution robust, sublicensable rights to use and develop those adaptations in the veterinary field.
Field-of-use licensing offers a sensible compromise:
The company retains the human indications. The veterinary institution or consortium receives defined rights for canine and other veterinary indications, along with a share of the revenue generated in that market.
Third, we must talk openly about money, not in a mercenary sense, but in recognition that economic structures shape scientific relationships.
If canine data are used in an investigational new drug (IND)/investigational device exemption (IDE), in label expansion, or in regulatory filings that materially advance a product, that contribution should be mirrored by:
Pre-specified milestone payments, or
Contributions to endowed funds supporting comparative neuro-oncology, resident training, and infrastructure in the veterinary school.
Partner hospitals that bore the early risk and work should not end up paying full commercial prices for mature devices they helped refine; preferential access, training, and support are reasonable expectations.
Fourth, data and publication rights must be protected.
Veto power over negative or equivocal results is incompatible with academic medicine.
Reasonable delays to allow patent filing are justifiable; indefinite suppression of awkward findings is not.
Veterinary PI’s should have access to raw data, the ability to conduct independent analyses, and the freedom to publish veterinary-focused work even when the human-facing narrative is still evolving.
Finally, these arrangements must be transparent - for trainees, for clients, and for the broader community.
Residents and PhD students deserve to know when their work sits inside a commercial pipeline, and to be protected in authorship and career terms.
Clients should understand that, in participating, their animal is both a patient and a partner in translational research that may benefit companies as well as future human and veterinary patients.
None of this requires hostility toward industry.
On the contrary, the most successful human oncology consortia have learned that clear rules and shared benefits make collaborations stronger, not weaker.
Veterinary neurology/neurosurgery and neuro-oncology should follow the same path.
Rick’s Commentary
We have moved a long way from the era when dogs were anonymous experimental subjects in laboratory basements.
Today they are recognized as individual patients, beloved by their owners, and as powerful partners in comparative medicine.
Our institutional arrangements should catch up with that reality.
If veterinary hospitals are going to continue opening their operating rooms, MRI suites, and clinics to neurosurgical and biotech innovation, then it is time to insist that they are not just test sites, but co-authors of the future:
Scientifically. Ethically. And yes, economically too.
Additional Reading
Adapting Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy for the Treatment of Naturally Occurring Intracranial Tumors in Dogs. Christopher L. Mariani et al. Clin Cancer Res; 31(20), 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12521916/
High-Frequency Irreversible Electroporation Alters Proteomic Profiles and Tropism of Small Tumor-Derived Extracellular Vesicles to Promote Immune Cell Infiltration. Kelsey R. Murphy et al. Cells 14 :1782, 2025. https://www.scilit.com/publications/4f97ed7da675ba231c52663a0d387ed9
Systemic mRNA vaccines elicit rapid immune activation in canine brain tumors. Carrera-Justiz S, et al. J Immunother Cancer 13:e011817, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12606501/pdf/jitc-13-11.pdf
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