Yes, Birds Get Cancer: A Founder Story
I remember the smell of antiseptic, the clients in the waiting room, the sound of anxious dogs and cats and the distinct smell of blood - and it fascinated me. I don't have many memories of actually being 7, but this experience made it very evident this was my future. Our family veterinarian saw a child with an unusual passion and drive for the art of medicine and offered me a chance to “volunteer” at his clinic. Here was a way to take my feeling of kinship with animals, that is as intrinsic to me as breathing, and bring it to the next level - to speak for the animals that cannot speak for themselves and become a healer.
Those early experiences with Dr. Greg Bishop, DVM, at Middletown Animal Clinic in Louisville, Ky. sparked a passion in me for learning with singular focus - to be accepted into a top veterinary school and practice the medicine I loved. I entered veterinary school at the University of Florida at the age of 20, before most students have finished their junior year of college. The summer before entering vet school I had the lucky accident of working with the only boarded avian vet in Kentucky. Not only did I gain experience treating not just birds, but chinchillas, wallabies, iguanas and whatever else clients brought into his practice, but I found I loved the challenge of working in a field where so much was unknown and where there was so much still to be discovered. There was so much potential to improve the lives of these patients through research into their biology and diseases. I focused on exotic animals during vet school, which included working with giant Koi fish receiving MRIs and rabbits undergoing radiation treatments. In addition, because it was Florida after all, 8ft alligators need annual exams. It quickly became apparent there are so many parallels between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ medicine.
Once out of school, I drilled down on these ‘special species’, completing an intensive internship in downtown Manhattan at the Animal Medical Center. After being accepted at University of California - Davis to start a residency in Companion Exotics at one of the top vet schools in the world, I had the privilege of being able to focus on advancing science and research on unique species. It was at UC Davis where I first observed how the same disease can behave differently in different species. A melanoma in a dog doesn't behave the same as it does in a corn snake or on the toe of a rabbit. Also, there were clear differences in physiology. Birds tolerate much higher doses of radiation than rabbits or guinea pigs, but why? As I neared the end of my residency, I became so much closer to that goal I set out for myself 20 years earlier as that 7-year-old in the vet clinic of helping patients in the real world. Then in 2008, everything changed.
Along with the market crash, so did my job prospects in veterinary academia. Not only were veterinary hospitals experiencing hiring freezes, but several exotic services closed down, as many people were now unwilling to pay for expensive services on their child’s guinea pig in a major recession. My choices were narrowed to two: find a job in a clinical practice and give up the clinical research I had come to love; or continue my education, pursue a Ph.D. and hope the job market improved in the meantime. As I was making the decision whether to enter a Ph.D. program at UC Davis with Dr. Michael Kent, a radiation oncologist with whom I had treated many patients, I received an intriguing email from the Comparative Medicine program at Stanford. It turned out they were offering a specific program to support veterinarians in Ph.D. programs. As Stanford has one of the top Cancer Biology programs in the country, I quickly applied, not knowing if I’d have a chance.
It was during my interview for the Stanford Cancer Biology program when the course of my career abruptly changed. I remember very clearly sitting in the office of a prominent Cancer Biology faculty (a faculty member who would eventually sit on my committee) when he asked me “Why do YOU want to do a Cancer Biology PhD?”.
I began to tell him of my experience treating my patients-- rabbits with thymomas, birds with colon cancer and snakes with skin tumors-- and that I wanted to understand cancer at a basic level, its common drivers and pathways. His facial expression appeared puzzled and he looked at me quizzically, asking a very prophetic question....“Birds… get cancer?”.
Up to this point in my career, I thought I understood my role and how I was supposed to make a difference with my life. With his question, that understanding changed. I remember feeling a chasm open up right in front of me that had been invisible to me before. At that point I realized the massive biomedical research complex, that drives all of our hopes and dreams for cures for the diseases of mankind, was based on a flawed assumption: that only humans suffer ‘human’ diseases. I now very clearly saw my purpose precisely laid out in front of me with this opportunity to close this chasm between veterinary and human medicine with the understanding that they are very often one and the same.
I immediately went to work at Stanford pursuing this idea, completing both a Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship, and establishing the Exotic Species Cancer Research Alliance (ESCRA), which is still active in its work to help realize the many advances in human cancer research that can made by studying mechanisms across species. Stanford is also where I co-founded Fauna Bio with two amazing scientists who shared this realization, but coming at it from very different, yet complementary perspectives. It is this shared vision and expertise across clinical practice, genomics and hibernation biology that make Fauna Bio what it is today. With every success our company achieves, we are better able to envision a world where we eliminate the false divide between species and use the full power of evolution and genomics to cure our worst diseases.
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