In February, California resident Frank Lucido filed a class-action lawsuit claiming Beneful, a dog food by Purina, made his dogs sick. In his complaint, he alleges the dry food was the reason his three dogs, which were living in separate houses, all fell ill or, in the case of his 8-year-old English bulldog, died. More than 3,000 other pet owners have joined the lawsuit after liver failure and other intestinal issues arose in their dogs.
Dogs, like people, can get cancer--and research has shown that canine and human cancers can be very much alike. Austrian scientists recently found that the receptor proteins that coat the surface of various canine tumors are 91 percent similar to human cancers. Taking the next step, they took antibodies from mice and tweaked them so that they were able to bind to canine cancer cells, which in some cases slowed the growth of canine tumors, and in other cases led to the death of the cancer. These antibodies could be used to treat dogs with a variety of cancers in the future, the researchers wrote in their study, published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.
Three researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including one of the co-creators of Google Glass, are working to develop a new piece of technology attire - for dogs. The project, FIDO (Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations), would allow dogs to communicate crucial information - be it about navigation for the blind, bombs for security, or diagnoses for doctors - to their handlers or owners.
For the past few years, scientists at Cambridge University have been working with dogs who were paralysed in accidents to test therapies and new cell treatments that reverse the damage. A new study shows that their methods can work, restoring dogs' ability to walk by using cells grown from the lining of the animals' noses. In the study, 23 dogs with transplanted cells were able to walk again.
