SIX VMBS FACULTY–FOUR CTSA FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS

The intersection of animal and human health offers ample opportunities to progress healthcare outcomes for animals and human beings alike, as medical advances for all species are made through collaborative research efforts at this junction.

Six faculty members from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) received funding in the form of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grants to advance medical research for both animals and human beings.

Learn more about next-generation healthcare and medical advances in these brief explorations of CTSAfunded collaborations.

Curing The Kiss Of Death

Kissing bugs, blood-feeding insects that typically attack the face with a painful bite, pose a health threat to both human beings and animals. When a kissing bug is infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease, the insect’s “kiss” can become deadly if the bug defecates while biting their victim. Unlike tickand mosquito-borne pathogens, kissing bug-borne pathogens spread through their feces.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention estimates that 8 million people in Mexico, Central America, and South America are infected with Chagas disease, with an additional 300,000 people infected in the U.S. Dog kennels in southern states attract kissing bugs with heat and smells, putting dogs at greater risk of contracting Chagas in these areas.

Dr. Ashley Saunders, a VMBS professor and assistant head of the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, and Dr. Sarah Hamer, a VMBS professor and Richard Schubot Endowed Chair and director, have teamed up with Dr. Rick Tarleton, a professor in the University of Georgia’s Department of Cellular Biology, to advance treatment options for dogs fighting Chagas disease.

“Our approach is to use an existing antiparasitic drug, which is already approved for use in treating humans infected with the Chagas disease parasite, in tremendous win-win.”

CTSA’s initial expansion to include veterinary schools was championed by Dr. Deborah Kochevar ’81, who earned her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree from Texas A&M and her doctorate in biomedical sciences from UT Southwestern. As dean of the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Kochevar worked with NCATS to form the CTSA One Health Alliance (COHA), which created a coalition of veterinary schools participating in CTSAs.

Establishing COHA opened the door for deeper collaborations through the forming of relationships and leveraging the expertise of physicians, research scientists, veterinarians, and other professionals who are studying diseases that are shared by human beings and animals. The alliance is focused on creating animal disease models, clinical trials, clinician/scientist education and training resources, biobanking resources, communication and collaboration, and clinical research jobs and fellowships.

Deepening Relationships And Research

The CTSA partnerships between medical schools and veterinary schools have provided myriad benefits.

“Investigators from both institutions have the opportunity to collaboratively solve problems encountered in translational research processes, including identifying new drug targets for a variety of diseases,” Toto said. “The partnership also can create new research questions that could only be answered by interdisciplinary research teams. Formation of such teams can help investigators successfully compete for extramural funding to pursue answers to important questions in various animal/human diseases.”

Examples of research areas with translational implications include cancer, Chagas disease, bladder dysfunction, orthopedic diseases, and metabolic and neurologic disorders and diseases.

“Veterinary schools allow for researchers to leverage naturally occurring disease models in non-rodent animals alongside human clinical research,” said Dr. Charles Long, a professor in VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology. “This provides a natural step in translational research, bridging rodent and human research.”

The CTSA program also provides access to researchers who work in different types of labs.

“The CTSA program offers an opportunity to establish new working relationships with people outside of our institution,” Long said. “Certainly, the investigators at UT Southwestern, due to their location, have no access to the resources that the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences has, especially in terms of large animal models. In that context, the UT Southwestern and the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences’ collaboration is almost obvious.” new ways to combat the biology of the Chagas parasite that has made it so hard to treat,” Hamer explained.

The project is an ideal CTSA fund recipient, as it offers high impact opportunities for trainees in graduate school, veterinary school, and veterinary residency programs to work in endemic kennel environments and collect samples for analysis in the laboratory. This work also is important in mitigating the spread of a disease that is the source of an ongoing public health problem.

“Research on a neglected disease is a long and arduous process,” Saunders said. “With persistence, we continue to learn about Trypanosoma cruzi epidemiology and clinical Chagas disease. This kind of work relies on grant funding to be successful, and we are very appreciative of the CTSA support.”

PREPARING FOR A POST-ANTIBIOTIC WORLD

The World Health Organization recognizes antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest threats to global health, food security, and development, which is why Dr. Sarguru Subash is interested in reducing or eliminating the need to prescribe antibiotics to treat urinary tract infections (UTI) in both animals and human beings.

Because UTIs are one of the leading infections treated with antibiotics, Subash, a tenured associate professor in the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, is working collaboratively with Dr. Phillippe Zimmern, the Felecia and John Cain Distinguished Chair in Women’s Health at UT Southwestern, to develop a model for testing next-generation treatments for UTIs.

Subash explained that the treatments their research will review are host-directed, a strategy that aims to enhance the body’s natural, protective response to infection.

“If we have a way to pharmacologically boost what the host is naturally doing to infections, we think that would be a novel way to combat urinary tract infection,” Subash shared. “So we are aiming to look at the role of copper at the host pathogen interface. Our immune system harnesses the toxic potential of copper by selectively exposing bacterial pathogens to copper.”

Read more about Subash’s next-generation UTI treatment on page 14

“Such collaborations are vital to future research that could lead to improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. These collaborations also can identify, through basic and clinical investigation, methods for accelerating the discovery of new pharmacologic therapies for human diseases.”

- DR. ROBERT TOTO

UT Southwestern leaders share a similar perspective.

“For UT Southwestern, access to the veterinary clinical research and biorepositories (facilities that collect and store biological samples for laboratory research) at Texas A&M’s School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences provides needed resources for translational research,” said Dr. Stacy Pritt, associate vice president for research support and regulatory management at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “Our faculty gain the ability to work with A&M’s veterinarians and other researchers to approach research problems holistically and with more diverse animals.”

Expanding Opportunities

Work on the CTSA program began with a pilot grant program, which made its first round of funding awards in fall of 2021.

“These awards really helped those principal investigators elevate their research program,” Levine said. “Moving into the next phase, we are requiring that each project that receives an award have representation at each institution, and there is matching money that comes from the (VMBS) Dean’s Office to enlarge the size of these awards.”

Additionally, a virtual seminar series is now held quarterly; these well-attended presentations feature researchers from both schools whose work focuses on the same subject area.

“We might have a glia scientist from UT Southwestern present alongside a veterinarian scientist here who works in a parallel cancer model,” Levine said. “That’s a good opportunity to share information.”

In the winter of 2023, the partnering institutions hope to have a mini conference.

“We really want to see if we can develop broader connections,” Levine said. “Developing those connections will set us up for the next pilot grant cycle. Hopefully, we can get even stronger applications.”

Discussions also are ongoing about opportunities for students to collaborate with faculty from the partnering institution.

“UT Southwestern students interested in biomedical research may benefit in the future through scientific collaborations and communications with both faculty and students at Texas A&M,” Toto said. “Vice versa, Texas A&M

Advancing Scientific Models

Science is an eternal quest—one scientific discovery can lead to thousands of advancements in a vast array of fields.

While some advancements are small, others change our understanding and scientific practices forever.

Dr. Charles Long, a professor in the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology, and Dr. Jun Wu, an assistant professor and the Virginia Murchison Linthicum Scholar in Medical Research in the UT Southwestern Department of Molecular Biology, have teamed up to develop a large animal model that could change basic biomedical research and animal and human health.

The Food & Drug Administration requires drugs to be tested for safety and efficacy in both laboratories and animals before human drug trials can begin. While some illnesses and disease can be tested in small animal models, such as mice, more complicated conditions often require more complicated large animal testing.

Long and Wu are using CTSA funding to develop technology that would increase efficiency in developing large animal models and reduce the number of animals needed for testing.

“This blastoid technology would allow us to do exactly the same things that we do in the mouse in a large animal, sheep, goat, cattle, and pigs, effectively at the same efficiency level,” Long said. “It would dramatically improve our efficiency and reduce the number of animals needed. It’s a huge win for humans and for animals.”

If the research is successful, Long and Wu will have built the scientific foundation needed to advance medical care for cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal diseases, cancer, and other deadly health conditions.

Exercising Heart Health

Someone dies from cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds in the United States, making heart disease the leading cause of death in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

students may benefit from such potential collaborations.”

VMBS administrators are finalizing plans to give interested first-and second-year veterinary students the chance to work in UT Southwestern’s research lab through the Veterinary Medical Scientist Research Training Program (VMSRTP), which is coordinated by Long and Dr. Dana Gaddy.

As part of this 13-week experience, Aggies would move to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for the summer to work with a mentor from the UT Southwestern faculty. As part of the VMSRTP requirements, students complete a poster, oral presentation, and manuscript that can be submitted for publication based on their research experience.

Both institutions believe these types of efforts will lead to major breakthroughs in the future.

“Such collaborations are vital to future research that could lead to improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease,” Toto said. “These collaborations also can identify, through basic and clinical investigation, methods for accelerating the discovery of new pharmacologic therapies for human diseases.”

Texas A&M’s representatives agreed, noting the goal of improving One Health.

“Translating basic science advances into clinical intervention can move faster when research teams are nimble in model species,” Criscitiello explained. “This amplifies the scope of impact for all animal health—whether companion animal, wildlife, production animal, or human.” ■

While statistics about heart disease in America are abundant, information about the fat tissue and fat cells around blood vessels that supply oxygen and nourishment to the heart muscle, known as coronary arteries, and the role secretions from the surrounding fat tissue and cells may or may not play in influencing coronary vessels is lacking.

Dr. Annie Newell-Fugate, an assistant professor in the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology (VTPP), and Dr. Cristine Heaps, a VMBS VTPP professor, are working to expand our understanding of the microenvironment of the coronary vessels and surrounding adipose tissue. Their research is the first of its kind.

Newell-Fugate explained that exercise promotes secretion of molecules from fat tissue that play functional roles in metabolism and may also stimulate the secretion of hormones from this tissue that could control coronary vessel dilation.

She and Heaps will monitor sedentary and exercised pigs to better understand the fat tissue-coronary vessel microenvironment and the role exercise plays in heart health.

“What really keeps me going about poultry, in particular, is that the world’s population is growing, and the need for a cheap source of protein grows with it.”

According to Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) fourth-year veterinary student Jason Sousa, any part of the veterinary curriculum can be about poultry if you try hard enough.

Growing up around cats and dogs, Sousa knew he was going to be a veterinarian by the time he was 6 years old, but it wasn’t until he got to high school that he developed a passion for poultry.

“I hadn’t had any exposure to poultry before high school,” Sousa said. “Then I raised chickens and turkeys for FFA and did a little bit of everything with poultry.”

In 2015, he began his undergraduate degree in poultry science at Mississippi State University—and loved every minute of it.

“I realized that I could be a poultry veterinarian and that that was a viable career in an area where there was a need,” Sousa said. “I came into veterinary school knowing that that’s what I wanted to do.”

For Sousa, there are many aspects of the field that make poultry medicine appealing, but the interest begins simply with the birds.

“Birds are just very cool,” he said. “Their anatomy, their physiology—it’s all so unique and well-adapted to serve birds’ purposes, whatever they may be.”

“Poultry production is growing in and of itself, and more chicken houses are being built every year. So, the need for poultry veterinarians is definitely getting higher and higher because, on top of the growing industry, older veterinarians are retiring and leaving the industry.”

- JASON SOUSA

After starting his veterinary school journey, though, Sousa discovered just how scarce poultry veterinarians are. Because he estimates that there are only about 300 poultry veterinarians in the United States, whereas small animal veterinary students can find a variety of mentors available for each challenge they face, Sousa had to be a bit more creative with finding mentorships and experiences.

In his sophomore year, Sousa was assigned two mentors— Dr. Brandon Dominguez, at Texas A&M, and Dr. Yuko Sato, a poultry veterinarian at Iowa State University.

“Dr. Sato and I meet on Zoom every semester; she offered to let me come up and spend time with her lab and some poultry vets up in Iowa,” Sousa said. “I see her at all of the conferences I go to. I was so impressed that A&M was willing to go the extra step to help me make those connections.”

To further those connections and find additional field experience, Sousa is always prepared to jump at a chance to have a new poultry-centered adventure—no matter where it takes him.

“I’ve bounced around every corner of the country because the poultry industry is so geographically distinct,” Sousa said. “The South predominantly has broilers; in the North, there are a lot of layers; the West has a little bit of everything; and the Midwest has a lot of turkeys. You have to jump around to get good experiences.”

Sousa’s career plans involve completing a residency in production poultry medicine and becoming board certified with the American College of Poultry Veterinarians. Before then, he’ll be heading to North Carolina State University for a poultry health management rotation and then to California, Alabama, and Nebraska for more learning opportunities.

Because he has found an unexpected range of possibilities as a poultry veterinarian—from the production and clinical medicine side, in which veterinarians go out into the field daily to evaluate birds on farms, to the diagnostic and research side—his long-term goals remain up in the air, but he knows that no matter where he ends up in the industry, the work will be fascinating.

“I don’t know what that’s going to look like quite yet because I like it all a little too much to say I’m only going to work with one particular type of poultry for the rest of my life,” Sousa said.

One of his favorite aspects of the poultry industry is that it is vertically integrated, which means that many of the companies involved own everything from the hatchery and feed mill to the birds themselves, as well as the processing plants. As such, many of the consultations Sousa has participated in require plenty of detective work and investigative prowess.

“As a poultry veterinarian, if a plant says, ‘We’re noticing this problem; what’s going on?’ I might end up tracing that all the way back to the feed mill where they miscalculated the calcium and phosphorus inclusion,” he said. “I like that poultry vets get to have their toe in every single area of production and get to investigate what’s happening.”

In addition to the tracebacks, Sousa has found that the work requires a lot of forward thinking at an industrial scale.

“With clinical medicine, you might be looking at 100,000 birds or more at any given time,” he said. “You have to say, ‘How do I treat them?’ but, also, ‘How do I prevent this from happening the next time we place a flock in this house?’ You get to develop biosecurity and vaccine protocols.”

Along with keeping the birds healthy, part of a poultry veterinarian’s job is to keep in mind the safety of the people whom the animals will feed. With poultry constituting such a large part of the American diet, the field has become deeply intertwined with both public health and epidemiology.

In the future, Sousa believes that the path toward increased food safety will involve more collaboration between poultry scientists, researchers, and veterinarians.

“Food safety is absolutely something that’s coming under more and more scrutiny,” Sousa said. “It’s important that there’s collaboration. I think it’s at the forefront of everybody’s minds because there’s still a lot that we don’t know about what we, as veterinarians, can do, especially in the midst of growing pressure to use fewer antibiotics.”

Additionally, the field of poultry medicine must grow in tandem with the ever-expanding human population.

“Poultry production is growing in and of itself, and more chicken houses are being built every year,” Sousa said. “So, the need for poultry veterinarians is definitely getting higher and higher because, on top of the growing industry, older veterinarians are retiring and leaving the industry. I’d say, at this time, there’s probably more of a need for poultry vets than there is a supply of poultry vets.”

Nonetheless, Sousa is happy to be a part of the tight-knit field, and no matter how the specifics of his career shake out, he takes comfort in knowing that he’ll be part of the force for creating positive changes in the availability and safety of human food.

“What really keeps me going about poultry, in particular, is that the world’s population is growing, and the need for a cheap source of protein grows with it,” Sousa said. “Unfortunately, beef and swine take a long time to grow. They’re more expensive and they’re not as accessible to people who need food at a low cost. I think poultry is what’s going to be feeding people in the future.

“What keeps me going, even on bad days, is knowing that what I’m doing is ultimately helping to make sure more birds stay alive and can be a source of food for somebody.” ■

By discovering an issue that was new to the medical community, an Aggie graduate student has made a breakthrough in Down Syndrome research that may one day lead to better medical care for people with the condition.

Kirby Sherman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences’ (VMBS) Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology (VTPP), was always interested in science and medicine, so much so that when she was only 10, she talked her dad into letting her watch shows like “ER.”

“It was probably not the best show for a 10-year-old kid, but I loved it,” she said.

When she was 11, that interest got a lot more personal.

“I was in an accident and essentially broke my face,” she said. “I had an orbital floor blowout fracture, broke my sinus, and had a whole bunch of external trauma. I had to have several surgeries between the ages of 11-15; that spurred my interest in regeneration, biomaterials, and the scaffolding they can use to rebuild bones. I was so intrigued by it that I would read all of my medical records.”

That interest remained when Sherman was considering her future career.

Although she came from a family of petroleum engineers, including both parents and two siblings (Aggie classes of ’88, ’89, ’13, and ’17), she went in a different direction, receiving her undergraduate degree in animal science and her master’s degree in biomedical sciences.

In her graduate bone diseases class, she found her calling.

“I thought learning about bone diseases was the coolest thing ever,” she said. “It correlated to my own injuries and my interest in how to induce healing in people who have traumatic injuries.”

Soon, she found herself volunteering in VMBS Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences (VIBS) professor Dr. Dana Gaddy’s lab for a year before jumping at the chance to work in the laboratory of VTPP department head Dr. Larry Suva, whose research interests include bones and Down syndrome (DS).

“Scientists have been studying fractures for a long time in a lot of different species, and while healing might be slow in some cases, the vast majority of fractures do eventually heal in all species. In our research, the fractures didn’t heal at all.”

- KIRBY SHERMAN

The pioneering research that has resulted from their work together has led to the discovery that based on animal models, people with DS may not heal from fractures, with Sherman publishing a manuscript earlier this year in the journal BONE highlighting their findings.

Previous research has indicated that bone density in the DS population is lower, which increases the likelihood of bone fracture, and while scientists believed that the healing response to fractures would be different in people with DS, Sherman’s discovery seems to confirm for the first time that fractures in people with DS do not heal at all.

“Scientists have been studying fractures for a long time in a lot of different species, and while healing might be slow in some cases, the vast majority of fractures do eventually heal in all species,” Sherman said. “In our research, the fractures didn’t heal at all.”

“A fracture not healing properly, what we call a non-union, can kill people, whether they have Down syndrome or not,” Suva said. “If this population really has a higher rate of nonunion than the average population, that’s a big deal.”

Pioneering Work

In Suva’s lab, Sherman was tasked with the DS study in part because of her interest in fracture healing, but also in part due to timing.

Sherman was only a couple of months into her Ph.D. program when rare mice that share characteristics of humans with DS arrived in Suva’s lab. Interested in fracture healing and early in her preliminary work for her Ph.D., the timing was right for Sherman to study these mice.

What she learned was not only surprising to herself but to everyone else in the lab.

“When bones heal, a soft callous made of cartilage, a sort of glue, will form on the bones and then connect the fractured ends back together; we call this bridging,” said Sherman. “In Down syndrome models, the glue starts to form, but it’s never able to bridge.

“We always thought the healing response would be different, but for them to not have any healing at all was incredible,” she said. “And it’s alarming, because if this is happening in people, it’s a serious health concern.”

According to Suva and Sherman, there are two primary reasons why this issue has gone undetected until now.

During 93 days post-fracture (DPF), wild-type (WT) mice had normal fracture healing, while both male and female mice with Down syndrome (DS) began mineralization but did not successfully bridge.

The first is that people with DS are living much longer than they used to. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1960, people with DS had a life expectancy of just 10 years. By 2007, as more was learned and applied to offset the endocrine impacts of Down syndrome, the life expectancy was 47 years.

“We’ve known that bone mass is lower in this population, and the increased life expectancy has allowed researchers to better understand the long-term implications of their lower bone mass,” Suva said. “Today, there are people with DS in their 20s and 30s who have bone mass and bone architecture consistent with someone in their 60s. They’re active members of the community and they’re playing sports. Obviously, that’s great, but if they’re at increased risk of bone fractures that won’t heal, it’s also a concern.”

The second reason this issue stayed undetected for so long is that specialized care for people with DS has not been a consideration by doctors and hospitals, which means that there wasn’t data readily available to identify this issue.

“You’d think we’d have this information from a database, but there’s not a medical code that identifies people with Down syndrome,” Suva said. “Down syndrome support groups and family members don’t want their loved ones or themselves singled out for having a disease. After all, they’re normal people.

“As a result, even with all of the fractures that get recorded every day in the United States, there’s no way to identify which of those patients have Down syndrome and, therefore, no organized way to track their healing,” he said.

The next steps in the research will involve trying to find that data and focusing on the actual mechanisms preventing the healing of the fractures.

Since nobody knew this was a problem, nobody was looking for solutions.

When Sherman presented this research at a DS meeting in California earlier this year, the attendees were amazed at their findings.

“People were speechless,” she said. “It seems extreme to say that the fractures were not healed at all, but that’s the reality. A lot of why they’re speechless is people just don’t know this is a problem. But at least now that we know, we also know that it’s something we need to monitor and research more.”

The team plans to continue studying this topic and has submitted funding requests with hopes to do just that.

“We want to keep running with this,” Sherman said. “We want to learn, mechanically, why these fractures are not healing.

“The end goal would be to therapeutically treat it, to try and induce healing,” she said. “That’s the ultimate goal—being able to induce normal healing without having to surgically fix these fractures.” ■

“AI is going to be the future of a lot of things; people use it more often than they think they do. I definitely think it is going to be a big thing in veterinary medicine, because it’s going to allow us to provide services to clients at a cheaper cost and a lot faster. With the high caseloads veterinarians have, it’s going to be a really good tool for the future.”

- TABITHA BAIBOS

After a veterinary student and an engineering student teamed up for an invention competition, they decided to turn their prototype into a real, AI-based program to help veterinarians diagnose canine heart disease.

Story by ASHLEY VARGO

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a phrase on the tip of many tech experts’ tongues, and with the help of Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) fourthyear veterinary student Tabitha Baibos and her fiancé Tomas Reyes ’20 ‘22, AI is taking on new life in veterinary medicine.

After creating an award-winning prototype during a student competition, Baibos and Reyes are further developing their invention in an effort to improve canine heart disease treatment. Their AI-based algorithm has become the center of the pair’s start-up company and is now being fine-tuned with the help of VMBS professor and Eugene Ch’en Chair in Cardiology Dr. Sonya Gordon and other veterinarians.

Inception Of Radanalyzer

A desire to help animals is nothing new for Baibos; the pet parent of four cats and one dog has dreamed of becoming a veterinarian since she was young.

“I was introduced to the idea of becoming a veterinarian through a book series I read as a kid,” Baibos said. “I love to read, and there is a series called ‘Animal Ark’ about a little girl whose parents owned a veterinary clinic. I was in love with the series and read all of those books; that’s really what made me want to become a vet.”

Since becoming an Aggie veterinary student, Baibos has continually pursued opportunities beyond the school’s curriculum, including raising puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind, as a VMBS student ambassador, and more.

This year, Baibos put her knowledge of veterinary medicine to the test through Aggies Invent, a 48-hour design competition in which students develop a prototype in response to a given challenge.

For the January 2022 VetMed competition, held in conjunction with the Texas A&M College of Engineering, the challenge was posed simply—create an innovative solution for a veterinary care problem.

Baibos was the sole veterinary student among a team of engineering students, which included her fiancé. Their team decided to tackle the prompt by developing a way to more easily calculate vertebral heart score in dogs—an area of much-needed development.

“When dogs start to develop heart disease—and this could be for several reasons, but it’s really common in smaller dogs as they get older—their hearts will start to get bigger, usually because there’s an increased amount of blood in the heart or it’s pumping really, really hard,” Baibos said. “Usually, a veterinarian has to stand at a computer and use a ruler tool on an X-ray image and hope they’re finding the right spots to measure from.”

While the typical method for measuring and calculating vertebral heart score is both time-consuming and errorprone, it is also vital because it helps veterinarians determine if treatment is necessary or if a certain course of treatment has been effective. Baibos and her team sought to take out the guess-work and the time constraints of the process.

“We went all over the web to find pictures of X-rays that we could use freely,” she said. “My fiancé made an algorithm using artificial intelligence that can literally just look at the picture and, within seconds, give you a calculation.”

Having someone with a veterinary background certainly gave Baibos’ team a competitive edge; it also gave Baibos the chance to take on a teaching role.

“It was a good challenge for me to be able to take my knowledge and explain it in a way that an 18-year-old with no veterinary background could understand,” Baibos said. “Some of my teammates never even had pets. So, having to explain these concepts, the whole veterinary side of things, was a challenge for me.

“Our goal is to be able to use RadAnalyzer for things other than just vertebral heart score, like looking at diseases in the lungs or looking for bone fractures. So, hopefully, I will be able to use it in my own practice.”

- TABITHA BAIBOS

“The competition was super fun. I didn’t think I would enjoy it, but I loved it,” Baibos said. “It showed me that I am capable of doing more than I thought and gave me the opportunity to think about problems from a different perspective.”

After taking home first prize, Baibos and Reyes couldn’t simply abandon the work they’d done. Instead, they developed it further by co-founding RadAnalyzer, a company that aims to incorporate AI into everyday veterinary practice.

“After we finished the weekend project, we thought more about how there’s a need for this,” Baibos said. “We have spent the past couple of months working on it, and now we’re an official business.”

The duo has landed some minor investors already, and they aren’t stopping there.

“We just submitted our application for a start-up accelerator through Amazon Web Services,” Baibos said. “We’re also in the process of getting veterinarians to sign up and use our website.”

Improving The Algorithm

Vertebral heart score is traditionally measured by manually choosing specific points on a radiograph to mark the top and bottom of the heart, as well as the edges of the heart’s widest area. Veterinarians then measure these dimensions and determine how many vertebrae the measurement corresponds to on the dog’s spine. In total, seven points have to be found on an image each time.

RadAnalyzer finds these points and makes the measurements and calculations automatically, but it is still in the testing stage. The AI improves when experts validate the accuracy of its measurements or apply corrections when it chooses faulty points on new X-ray images.

The service is currently free for veterinarians to use in their own practices and to provide feedback. Veterinarians can upload patients’ anonymized X-ray images to the app or website, which will automatically calculate the vertebral heart score. The points on the vertebrae that the algorithm selects will appear on the image, and, if veterinarians using the program don’t agree with the points, they can make adjustments that the AI will learn from.

The AI is also learning more and more as interns at the Texas A&M Small Animal Teaching Hospital make use of the tool for cases requiring a vertebral heart score; their work is verified by Gordon and then uploaded to the RadAnalyzer database to give the AI a broader range of correct examples.

“The goal is to publish our results showing that the algorithm is accurate and that the test metrics are good,” Baibos said. “We’re basically training our machine-learning model as if Dr. Gordon is doing them all herself. We’re hoping to provide a level of quality and accuracy that would be equal to a board-certified cardiologist.”

For Baibos and Reyes, working on RadAnalyzer goes beyond merely a professional endeavor; the two have had to adapt to each other’s working styles, and, ultimately, Baibos believes that developing RadAnalyzer has had a positive effect on their relationship.

“Working on RadAnalyzer really gives us something to bond over,” Baibos said. “We had two separate worlds and were able to bring them together. It’s also really helped him to connect with my friends from vet school. And we got engaged literally a week after we won Aggies Invent, so, you could say it’s been really good for us.”

As for Baibos’ future, she plans to work at a feline-only clinic—perhaps, one day, even open her own—and get board certified in feline medicine. And although vertebral heart score isn’t used as often in cats as it is in dogs, RadAnalyzer will continue to be a major part of Baibos’ career.

“Our goal is to be able to use RadAnalyzer for things other than just vertebral heart score, like looking at diseases in the lungs or looking for bone fractures,” Baibos said. “So, hopefully, I will be able to use it in my own practice.”

Ultimately, Baibos hopes that the negative aspects of analyzing radiographs—the uncertainty of the measurements, the time required to get accurate results, and the cost to pet owners—will all be made obsolete with the expansion of AI.

“AI is going to be the future of a lot of things; people use it more often than they think they do,” Baibos said. “It is going to be a big thing in veterinary medicine, because it’s going to allow us to provide services to clients at a cheaper cost and a lot faster. With the high caseloads veterinarians have, it’s going to be a really good tool for the future.” ■

Susan Fontaine’s life-long love affair with dogs grew by leaps and bounds when she and her husband, George Corolla, started competing and showing their dogs in the early 1990s. Since then, the couple competed with six different dogs, all with names that started with an “M.”

Yet, as is the case with all pets, the Fontaine-Corollas’ dogs have faced health challenges over the years.

One of their most recent dogs, Murphy, wasn’t feeling well in 2017, so Susan took him to the veterinarian. Noticing a large lump in his throat, the veterinarian directed Susan to the Texas A&M Small Animal Teaching Hospital (SATH), where the German shepherd was diagnosed with lymphoma.

Murphy benefitted from the compassionate care of SATH’s staff as well as regular chemotherapy, which not only prolonged his life for three more years but also sustained his energy levels. He was still competing until two months before his death.

While the Fontaine-Corollas previously made gifts to the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS), the quality of care Murphy received during the last part of his life prompted Susan ’77 to establish the Susan Fontaine Endowment for Veterinary Clinical Trials, which will support research aiming to better both animal and human lives.

“We don’t only aspire to have research that directly impacts veterinary medicine, but we’re also very interested in human and environmental health,” said Dr. Jon Levine, head of the VMBS’ Small Animal Clinical Sciences Department (VSCS). “We know that dogs and cats—but especially dogs—have a lot of diseases that are very similar to people, whether we’re talking about cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or some heart diseases. Information we can find out genetically about how a dog’s cancer develops might be very relevant to human cancers.”

Showing Off

The couple’s entry into dog competitions began when they lived in Seattle and brought home Molly, a German shepherd, in the early 1990s.

“We signed up for obedience school and the obedience instructor said, ‘You ought to consider competing and showing the dog,’” Susan said. “I never had thought about what that life was like and it hadn’t occurred to me that there was even such a thing as obedience competitions.”

Susan and Molly’s first competition proved to be a learning opportunity.

“We went into the ring and then Molly left me—she was supposed to stay with me—and she went and sat in the middle of the ring and watched me perform to the judges’ commands,” she said, laughingly.

The experience, however, caused her competitive juices to kick in.

“I’m going to prove I can do this,” she said. “This dog and I are going to conquer this; that got me hooked on competing with dogs.”

A year later, the Fontaine-Corolla family got another

German shepherd, Max, which George decided to show while Susan showed Molly.

“It was a nice hobby we could do together,” Susan said. “We’d go to dog shows on the weekend and to class together. We’d do little workouts in our driveway in our neighborhood.”

Susan, who has also competed in rally and agility, believes dog competitions are a team sport.

“When the dog does well and you do well, there is no better feeling in the world. It is such a partnership with the dog; it’s like you’re in sync, so that’s the driving force of the competition,” she said. “Right now, with Mia, I’m doing nose work, which is scent detection that uses the dog’s natural ability to find a specific odor that’s hidden away. Mia has to communicate to me where it is and then I tell the judge. I’m right or wrong, based on what the dog has said to me.”

The couple was so committed to competing that, upon moving to College Station for retirement, they built a facility in their backyard so they could train locally instead of driving to Houston.

“I have a group of friends who come to do training together, but it’s not a business,” Susan said. “We support each other in our training efforts.”

Breaking Barriers

Susan’s ability to forge strong relationships was strengthened by her time as a student at Texas A&M. She came to campus right as women were being accepted into the Corps of Cadets and could live on-campus in dorms.

“There were four men to every woman, and there were around 18,000 students when I graduated,” she remembered. “It was very different than it is today.”

Her father was serving in the military and her family was stationed overseas when she enrolled at Texas A&M.

“I fit into the military culture; it was a family environment. I met really, really good friends with whom I’m still friends as we come up on our 45th class reunion,” she said. “I share my football tickets with my college roommate.”

After earning her degree, Susan stumbled into what turned into a 38-year career in the insurance industry, starting as an underwriting trainee at Aetna in Houston.

“It was a perfect fit for me. It’s very analytical and you get to learn a lot about a lot of different businesses,” she said. “It’s part psychologist, part detective, part actuary, and part fortuneteller—you try to predict who’s going to have a loss or a claim and what can you do to avoid that.”

Her work led to an introduction to her future husband and allowed the couple to live in Seattle and Wilmington, Delaware. As the couple neared retirement, they decided to look for a single-level home in a place with mild winters.

George, who wasn’t an Aggie, said, “What’s wrong with Bryan-College Station?” Noting that she was shocked that it was George’s idea, Susan explained about their decision to move to College Station in 2014, “I think he knew that I would be happy here. I’d brought him to a couple of reunions.”

Looking back over the years, Susan realizes that she entered both Texas A&M and the corporate world during a time of tremendous cultural change.

“It was the time period when women were coming to the workforce—and it was the same thing in my career,” she said. “I was the first commercial female manager for one of my insurance companies and the first female divisional president for another. I didn’t break the glass ceiling, but I knocked on it.”

Collaborative Partnership

Over the years, the couple lavished their attention on their dogs: Molly, Max, Missy, Moses, Murphy, and Mia.

“It started happening with Molly and Max, so when we got the next one, their name had to start with an ‘M,’” Susan explained.

With no children, the couple started considering how they wanted to distribute their estate—and both Texas A&M’s former College of Liberal Arts (which joined the new College of Arts and Sciences on Sept. 1) and the VMBS made their

“I’ve always loved dogs, but I had not connected with the vet school when I was in college. After watching Murphy’s experience, I thought that the school would be a good investment in the future.” initial list, leading to liberal arts scholarships and supporting VMBS’ facilities.

Yet, Murphy’s experience with the SATH had a significant influence on Susan’s future funding decisions.

“I’ve always loved dogs, but I had not connected with the vet school when I was in college,” she said. “After watching Murphy’s experience, I thought that the school would be a good investment in the future.”

After George died in 2021, Susan learned that she received an inheritance that allowed her to do more for Texas A&M.

“I don’t have to live off of my income anymore,” she explained. “I realized that I had money to play with and to do good with that I didn’t have before—so what can I do?”

After reviewing options with the Texas A&M Foundation’s VMBS development team, Susan came up with a plan for her investment.

“The clinical trial idea jumped right out at me because I had been thinking all along, ‘What else can I do to help other dogs not go through what Murphy went through?’” she said.

Soon after, she read about Levine’s research on glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer that affects humans and dogs. Levine noted that other VMBS researchers are studying conditions that could have implications for human beings, including Chagas disease and cartilage replacement, as well as the dog aging process.

Levine is already putting Susan’s endowment to work.

“Our immediate use for this is to help support a startup package for a geneticist we are hiring,” he said, adding that this position, which also incorporates funding from the Office of the Provost, will be a joint hire between VSCS and the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Pathobiology. “The idea behind this strategy is to amplify the collaborations we have. This geneticist will be a benchtop scientist who works with test tubes and looks at genetic data but also can connect with the faculty members who see cases in the trenches and identify new or current diseases that we don’t understand.”

Susan hopes that more donors will consider supporting these types of innovative efforts to improve the health of both dogs and human beings.

“I’m an ordinary person. I remember the days when I had to buy clothes on layaway and not buy groceries until I got my paycheck,” Susan said. “I think anybody can give—and anybody can plan to give in the future. You have to make it part of your values.” ■