When you hear a family member of a friend joined cancer treatment’s clinical trial, do not assume that the patient is really human.

In older cats and dogs, cancer is death’s leading cause and the clinical trials do offer hope about effective medications being developed, for the humans as well as other four-legged animals, according to cancer experts.

The latest National Veterinary Cancer Registry which was launched the previous month by one national team comprising human and animal cancer doctors, would point the pet owners towards clinical trials which might benefit the beloved companions that they have and also speed up development of the life-saving human therapies.

Dr Theresa Fossum, professor of the surgery with Texas A&M University’s veterinary medicine college, said that they would be capable of decreasing cost and beating time involved for discovering drug.

As there are many diseases that similarly affect people as well as their animals, the physicians and veterinarians say that much could be learned with the studies of how treatments go with dogs and cats.

The process of drug-assessment can be accelerated by one simple fact: compared to humans, dogs age much faster, and the cancers they have also progress rapidly. Also, many feline and canine cancers are about the same as the cancers which humans have.

The experts who weren’t involved with registry said that the database concept looks promising.

The associate professor at Yale School of Medicine as well as head of Yale Human Animal Medicine Project, Dr Peter Rabinowitz said that those clinical trials were going to be much real-world as compared to lab experiment.

Often the dogs are interesting model to understand cancers which are induced environmentally and Rabinowitz said that asbestos causes the cancer in humans thirty-five years after the exposure though if you tend to be a dog then you just get it within 4-5 years, so it could be seen how cancers naturally develop.

According to Fossum, she was always bothered by this cumbersome and slow ways of testing drugs and if that happened to be cancer drug, they would put human tumor inside a mouse but that doesn’t predict how drugs would work with people.

Then, when the tests are done to see whether the drug is toxic for humans, drugs afterwards are evaluated during clinical trials of humans that take more than one decade to be conducted and that means the drugs now coming out basically were started twelve years from now.

Fossum says that testing drugs in the pets does speed up process and allows researchers in determining if some medication works prior to taking it for clinical trials for humans and with permission of the pet’s owner, a new drug could be promising much sooner.

Concept of cancer database concerning cats and dogs could be expanded to include many other diseases, like diabetes. Around 800,000 dogs tend to have diabetes type 1 in US, according to Fossum. Other conditions, which a veterinary registry is capable of serving is cardiac, neurological and endocrine issues.

Around 6M cats and an equal number of dogs in US receive cancer diagnosis every year, as according to Animal Cancer Foundation, situated in Norwalk, Conn. If you tend to have a cat or dog which is from these, you could register the pet with National Veterinary Cancer Registry.

Registry got created by consortium of the cancer doctors of humans and animals, including the
specialists from Baylor Healthcare System situated in Texas, one Florida-based organization for wildlife education and animal rescue and Texas Veterinary Oncology Group and CARE Foundation.

Fossum says that as the registry happens to be new, it might take time before some valuable clinical trial association could take place between drug developers and animals.