Dr. Ehrhart: I think we tend not to think big, we tend to feel like we need to stay in our lane, and the world needs our voices. Human medicine does, public health does, and they need our perspectives. We need to be brave and have seats at the table in a lot of areas. Like sign up for a study section at NIH, come to the table for policymaking. Like there's a million ways in which if you think about it, that you can be involved in making impact, and it's okay to change lanes.
Dr. Venable: Welcome to the Veterinary Cancer Pioneers Podcast, the show where we delve into the groundbreaking work of veterinary professionals who are dedicated to advancing the field of veterinary oncology. I'm your host, Dr. Rachel Venable, and I'm thrilled to embark on this journey with you.
Dr. Venable: Hello and welcome to the Veterinary Cancer Pioneers podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Rachel Venable, and I am so excited today to have our guest, Dr. Nicole Ehrhart. Dr. Ehrhart is the Director of the Columbine Health System Center for Health Aging at Colorado State University and a full professor of clinical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University.
She holds the Ross Wilkins Indy Linn Preservation Foundation University Chair in Musculoskeletal Biology and Oncology. Dr. Erhard is a board veterinary surgeon. She also has a fellowship in surgical oncology. She was a professor at the University of Illinois and then came over to Colorado State and has been working at the Flint Animal Cancer Center. She has led the laboratory of comparative musculoskeletal oncology and traumatology, focusing on limb preservation research, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and cancer research. So, so much stuff to unpack there, and very interested to just see more about your career and how things have changed over time. She's also involved the Colorado State University School of Biomedical Engineering Cell and Molecular Biology Program, the University of Colorado Gates Regenerative Medicine Center, and University of Colorado Cancer Center. Very excited to learn more and how you're working with so many different universities and programs. So quite excited to hear how you've done that and juggled everything. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Nicole Ehrhart. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
Dr. Ehrhart: Oh, thank you for that very kind introduction and I am thrilled to be here and to reconnect with you and excited to share some insights in my journey.
Dr. Venable: Yeah, thank you. You know, I'm excited to talk with you today too. You know, it's been, it's been a hot minute since we were last together. And I knew at Colorado when I was there, you were doing a lot of, you know, I remember you with the musculoskeletal lab, but the aging project and some of those others I'm not really aware about. So can you share with us a bit more about just your background and journey that led you to even being a surgeon and we can kind of then learn more about what you're doing today?
Dr. Ehrhart: Like many of us veterinarians, you know, it's the only thing I've ever wanted to do since the time, I can even remember knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up. And then after getting into vet school, you know, a lot of my interests surrounded either emergency medicine or surgery, part of that's kind of because I like that immediate feedback. To me, that's really satisfying. But as I sort of progressed through my vet school years, surgery became kind of the front-runner. Mostly, to me, it was so fascinating and almost wondrous to think that you could actually open up a living creature, do something inside and that somehow things will get back to normal and tissues would heal. And it was almost a miraculous thing for me. And I loved every aspect of being able to hold something in my hands and do something to help it heal.
And so that's really where surgery came in. Fast forward to surgery residency. And very early in my residency, I had this really kind of funny experience where I was doing some surgery in an OR, I can't even remember. And Steve Withrow, who most of you on the podcast know is obviously one of the kind of pioneers in veterinary cancer surgery, comes sort of like stomping in the room. And I knew who he was, but I didn't really know him very well. And he said, you know, Ehrhart, I see that you have a lifeguard license on your CV. And I said that's right. And he goes, well, I need you to report to this camp for kids with cancer on this day with like a paddle and a sleeping bag and I was like, oh, OK, yes, sir. I will be there. I was sort of didn't have any idea what I was getting into. Anyway, so I show up. He'd been involved with this children's summer cancer camp. It's a camp called Sky High Hope Camp. It still exists today. And I'm still very involved today. But it was my first sort of exposure to people with cancer, particularly kids. And at the time in our residency, we were also learning about limb salvage and how animals with osteosarcoma and saving legs, et cetera. And many of the kids at this camp also had osteosarcoma and had amputation or some type of limb spare surgery. And so that was kind of my first inflection point of understanding like how thin the veil is between human and veterinary medicine and how much we have to teach each other this comparative aspect of medicine. And so that was kind of inflection point number one, which was, wow, what if I could do research in this area that would really impact not only our patients that walk on four legs but our human patients that suffer from the same types of conditions.
So that was the entry into cancer, specifically musculoskeletal cancer. And then in that process got more and more involved with the impacts of cancer. So, you know, not only do people suffer from the disease itself, but the impact on their lives lasts decades after the treatment for cancer is over. And I saw that as sort of an underserved area to think about, kind of got involved with like, how do we improve the quality of life of people that have suffered from cancer, specifically musculoskeletal cancers and how can we save limbs and prevent amputation in children that have bone cancer.
So that kind of led into more of a regenerative medicine side of my research, specifically looking at, is it safe? You know, Can we use some of the strategies that we would use, say in trauma, in a cancer setting, or a post-cancer setting? So for example, stem cells, if they activate the bone healing process, can they also activate any microscopic disease that may be floating around in the body or even locally in the surgery site?
So that was kind of the journey to surgical oncology and my journey into research and comparative cancer research. And then I sort of started thinking about aging.
Dr. Venable: And what an amazing experience going to that kids' camp. You know, I remember being at Colorado, we would hear a little bit about it. I never went to that camp, but it sounds like it totally changed your life. Would you say that?
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah. It did totally change my life because it made me realize the kind of impact that we can have, but also the desperateness of the families. It's going to take all of us working together and the incremental slowness of making inroads into cancer treatment, cancer impacts, and it was that urgency I felt like you know we needed to know something to do something better for these kids and we needed that yesterday and so even to this day which God I think it's been 30 years now I still am a counselor at this camp and I also have encouraged many of my grad students and trainees to go because I needed them to see like I wanted them to look into the faces of these families and these kids and understand how important the work that we were doing was doing was and why you know, it may feel rote looking under a microscope and counting live cells or looking at proliferation assays or whatever in the lab, but this work, this incremental work is something that we have to continue to push forward in order to make an impact.
Dr. Venable: Yeah. So powerful. I love that. And I would like to know more about the aging. So you're the director of the Columbine Health Systems Center for Health Aging. Could you kind of explain what that is and also how you became there because I wouldn't like myself as a veterinary oncologist, I wouldn't necessarily think, oh, I'll be the director of something like that. So yeah, maybe tell us how it is and how you got there.
Dr. Ehrhart: Thank you for the question because your statement is so common like everyone's like how in the world did this come about? So, first of all, just tell you the Columbine Health System Center for Healthy Aging is a catalyst. It's a research catalyst. I report directly to the vice president for research, and it essentially unites research in aging across all of CSU's colleges. So CSU has eight different colleges, including the College of Biomedical Science, but like engineering, business, etc. And so the kind of work that we do is we facilitate these very trans-disciplinary, very disparate teams of researchers to bring their own domains of expertise to the lens of the challenge of aging, whether that's on a population level or on a cellular level.
So that is kind of my role as director is to facilitate these people that really don't even speak the same language, you know, talking to a business person who's trying to talk to a cellular biologist, that is a very a conversation to have and you have to create sort of a common team science atmosphere to get even you know these people to in the same room together. So I love that. I've always sort of had that bent toward creating like out of the box thinking about problems that we are trying to face that I really do believe like the answer to the world's greatest challenges whether that's climate change or population or whatever is really best served by intersecting disciplines rather than trying to go at it from this single discipline perspective, which is common. You know, like that's what academia does very well is we can drill deeply into our own disciplines, but we fail sometimes to look across disciplines and think about things from a different perspective. So that's the role of the director. But how I kind of became interested in this is again, a series of inflection points. So I talked a little bit about how I went from thinking about veterinary medicine to comparative medicine in cancer specifically, and the impact that we could have on both human and veterinary cancer patients. So along the journey of my work in my lab, and I became really interested in muscle loss following cancer surgeries and bone loss,I got very interested in muscle-derived stem cells, which were kind of a new thing. This was probably you know, 20 years ago -ish. And so I did a sabbatical, and I did my sabbatical in 2018 at the Steadman Philippon Research Institute in Vale, Colorado. And then during that experience, I was really there to learn more about muscle-derived stem cells, because the researcher that kind of pioneered a lot of that work was there. But I had an opportunity to work with master athletes, and I was specifically looking at the stem cells from their muscle and looking at these incredible athletes that are these high-endurance people that are, you know, over the age of 60 and their stem cells are very different than sedentary individuals at the same age and they are more similar in terms of their function to young people and so kind of this again an inflection point in my work where I was thinking you know we have spent all this time looking at strategies to re-initiate regeneration in the body like if you have a big muscle or bone defect you basically exceed the body's ability to regenerate tissue. We as humans have a minimal amount of regenerative capacity, but if these big defects, whether that's trauma or cancer, you just exceed your ability to regenerate the tissue that you've removed. And I started thinking about what if the strategies that we've used for these acute defects, i.e.., cancer surgery, trauma, etc., what if we could apply that in the same way but to aging. because the same thing happens when we age. We begin to exceed our regenerative capacity or stem cell, population decreases, its robustness and ability to respond to injury is diminished. And can we actually restart that or rejuvenate that in over a chronic period of time rather than an acute setting? So again, that impact factor, right? Like suddenly I realized, okay, it's not just about veterinary medicine, it's about human and veterinary medicine. And then I started thinking, well, wait a minute, not everybody has cancer, not everybody has trauma and loses a limb or whatever, everybody ages.
So what if we could take the things that we're looking at in this acute setting and apply them in a more chronic setting? And that was another like moment of wonder when I realized that if you look at the biologic drivers of cancer, you know, the little circle that we're so used to seeing with genomic instability and telomere, et cetera, and you actually superimpose that on the fundamental drivers of cellular aging, you'll find that about seven of the nine big drivers are exactly the same. And so it was that moment where I was thinking, well, what if instead of like kind of playing whack-a-mole with one disease at a time, let's solve heart disease, let's start solve cancer, let's solve you know, neurodegeneration, What if we could look at something upstream? The common element of all of that is cellular aging, and those drivers of cellular aging are so similar to the drivers of cancer.
So it's no wonder that age is the highest risk vector for most cancers, not pediatric cancers, but most cancers. And so can we even have a bigger impact if we start thinking about things upstream of an actual malignant cell? And the drivers of aging, the biologic drivers of aging that are happening in the background are actually a targetable pathology that we can look at. So I started getting really, really, first of all, geeking out big time, but also really excited about the potential impact. Then when I got back from my sabbatical, this director position came up and I competed with other people. But one of the things that I felt was our differentiator as a new aging center associated with an academic institution was the comparative veterinary part of it, right? Like we've known this as cancer researchers are whole careers that cancer in people and cancer in dogs and cats are very similar in that we can learn so much. But that was a new discussion among the aging researchers.
And so if we were gonna be the new kids on the block to have an academic center on aging, what distinguishes us from anybody else was the fact that we had this population of patients, dogs, and cats that are aging with us in our homes, exposed to everything that we're exposed to over time, with our similar socioeconomic kind of status, second-hand smoke, you know, urban versus, you know, rural lifestyles, all of those things. And can we just think about that from an aging perspective?
Dr. Venable: So it's a great story. It was really interesting and it is true. I hadn't thought about the similarities between cancer and aging. It is fascinating to hear like a lot of the same drivers and you know it's just more of a chronic situation and how many more people you can impact.
So I think that's really neat that you always seem to have this bigger picture in mind. You know you have this very narrowed focus on you know like a specific disease-specific situation but then you always keep the big picture in your mind of how many more people can we help? How many more animals? And I think that's really neat. I think that's very special. Not everybody certainly has that kind of outlook on the world. The other thing I have a question because I might have missed this. You skipped over it kind of quickly. You said you were working with athletes, but they were 60 plus. How did you end up finding this community of 60-plus athletes?
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah, yeah. So the Steadman Philippon Research Institute is associated with the Steadman Clinic in Vale. And that is where a lot of athletes, including professional athletes and like figure skaters, tennis players, etc. all come for various different orthopedic surgeries. So there's a population of patients that are coming in to have whatever they're having done, whether that's hip replacement or ACL repair or whatever. And I was able to get consent from a number of different people that are master athletes to collect muscle during their surgery, just through the same incision. I didn't collect it, I was just there with my little test tube waiting to get that muscle. And then there's a similar cohort of people that come to that clinic that are not active. You know, they're over the age of 60 and maybe a little bit more typical of the population of that age, maybe more broadly, and then there are young people coming. So I had the opportunity to collect muscle from all those different cohorts and compare their stem cell robustness numbers. And I was actually also very interested in extracellular vesicles, which is part of the work that I do now and looking at you know, what was the regenerative capacity of the cells and their secretome relative to one another.
And exercise, as we know, is a longevity promotor right? People that have lifelong habits of exercise live longer and they live more healthy. And so this is one aspect of aging is the stem cell exhaustion. And people that are active into older ages, their stem cell pool is bigger and their stem cells are more robust and proliferative. And so it kind of dawned on me like we actually can change how we age on a cellular basis by some habits that we have. So clearly aging on a cellular basis is modifiable, right? Because I would look at it through the microscope I could see, like exercise was a modifying intervention.
But now that we understand the fundamental drivers of aging, all of a sudden we have a much bigger opportunity for targeting those. And so just like in cancer therapy, where we're thinking of, you know, what is driving cancer both molecularly, as well as like in the tumor microenvironment, et cetera, those are targets, right? So similarly, the things that we understand fundamentally drive aging are also targetable. So those two things are so connected. And so honestly, like approaching aging is a cancer treatment or a cancer prevention, you know what I mean? So there's this very tight interweaving story between the two fields. Put somebody like me in the picture that has a big interest in looking at things from different perspectives, across different disciplinary domains. And that's kind of what ignited the interest, is like, oh my God, I could see how this could hugely impact, not just cancer, but many diseases of aging. And then veterinary medicine, like one of the best things about this career, don't you think, is like, we can reinvent ourselves. This career has been so good to me in so many ways because I've been able to think about things I don't know that many other professions allow and then also pursue. You know, I mean, I've been so lucky.
Dr. Venable: You're right. I think sometimes people get stuck thinking, "Oh, I can only be a clinician," but there's so many options. And I think in veterinary medicine because we work with different species and we have to be flexible and do things. I think it is something where we're maybe a bit more apt to have more of that change in perspective or change. And, you know, well, now I kind of want to go this way, right? Like kind of workaround and how would you say, you know, even for you, how you kind of got to your different roles or maybe better way to say it is people that are younger in the profession, you know, what would you say to them? like if they think, you know, I don't know if I want to do clinics all the time. Like what is a good way to kind of keep things open or, you know, trying different avenues throughout your career?
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest, maybe most broadly applicable piece of advice would be that don't limit yourself. I mean, I think we're humble people, veterinarians, in general, are humble people, veterinarians that actually gravitating toward cancer work are even more humble people because we lose every day, right? Like we get beat by this horrible disease every day, and yet we still get up and we go to work and we put our days in and we do what we can to make a better difference in animal lives and your interest in research that can be expanded. I think we tend not to think big. We tend right to feel like we need to stay in our lane and the world needs our voices. Like I really really think human medicine does, public health does, and they need our perspectives. We need to be brave and have seats at the table in a lot of areas. Sign up for a study section at NIH, come to the table for policy making. Like there's a million ways in which if you think about it, you can be involved and make an impact, and it's okay to change lanes. That's the problem we sort of think we have to stay in our lane, I think this is a career that allows you to change lanes frequently. And I also think that it's healthy to kind of reinvent yourself every so often. It gives you longevity in a career, you know, it keeps you from being burnt out for sure. So you can tell I'm really excited about all this stuff. But partly that's because I've been brave enough to take the leap and I would encourage any young person who feels like they have a contribution or an idea to speak up. I think the world needs more veterinary voices out there.
Dr. Venable: I love that. I agree. I think more veterinarians, we do have a diverse look at things even, you know how we approach just a lot of different topics. So I think that's great. And I think you're right. It does help with burnout if you kind of mix it up a bit. Some people can keep doing the same thing every day, but I feel like a lot of us, you need to keep learning, keep adjusting, keep trying different things. And I love how, Like you said, just being bold and brave enough to step out of the lane, right? Step out into something different and kind of doing all of this. How would you say you kind of balance yourself? You know, You're a researcher, educator, clinician, and your family, you wear a lot of hats. So how do you do that?
Dr. Ehrhart: Generic answer is not always well. Work-life balance is a constantly moving target. It's kind of a mythical thing, right? It's not like there is work on one side and life on some other side. And we're trying to like, put some type of percentage of our effort or energy into both, or each, it is really kind of an integrated life. And so work is as much part of my energy and life. And I think for a lot of us, it is as family as my like community is my, I'm definitely a work hard play hard person, which I think has helped. Like I work hard, but I also really work hard at playing, not just physically working, but like I make sure that I can do fun things for myself that are really enriching to my mental health and emotional well-being and all that stuff. The answer is maybe a little less satisfying. I wish I had some recipe, but I would say, and I think this is true, particularly for women, especially because we have this time clock about childbearing years and we're usually in the middle of building our careers during that period of time and stuff. And we can't do it all, all the time, but what we can do is live an integrated life that is seeking out like fulfillment on so many different levels and whether that's motherhood and work and research and community engagement, whatever it is that your is kind of like, you know, melts your butter, you should allow yourself to have something from each of those areas and in your life. I will say as I took this director position and certainly throughout my career, this has been a drift from less and less clinics to more and more research. And the fact that I've been at an institution that has encouraged that and allowed me to explore different ways in which I could balance clinic and research and then ultimately like became this director, I really had to lay down clinic because it was something I couldn't do both. I miss it a lot, but I do get to cover for surgical oncology on the oncology service every now and then, so that's fun. I get to come back and play.
I do a lot of research surgery, so I'm still keeping my skills up. So yeah, I mean, I think your life progresses and you sort of have these different life phases, you know, young parenthood and then different as your children leave the home, and then you have aging parents. Like, there are different things that are pulling on you all the time. So again, I think you have to give yourself a bit of a break that you don't have it have it all dialed in because it's always changing. As soon as you get it dialed in, it changes again, right? And I think I've learned that like, I used to think I somehow would have all this guilt, like whether it was mom guilt or work guilt or whatever, guilt for a million things. And I started giving myself a bigger break and being like, you know what, you're like, you're doing okay, you know? And so anyway, I don't know if that's that helpful, but I hope people can at least be a little bit more gentle with themselves about that stuff.
Dr. Venable: I think that's a very honest answer. I like how you said work-life balance is kind of a myth 'cause it is just for all the reasons you said, there's so much at different aspects of your life where sometimes you have to pour more into your family, sometimes you have to pour more into your work. But I do like what you're saying about, just have more grace, more patience, be nicer. Just sometimes I feel like the hardest critic is yourself. You know, so I like that, just being a little bit more patient, give yourself some room and things. And speaking about patience, I'm guessing you have to use this. How are you, you know, you're involved with at least two universities, right? You're at Colorado State and University of Colorado. How do you manage all of that? That seems like that might require some patience, dealing with everybody or what is that like?
Dr. Ehrhart: Well, it does in the sense that like there's a lot of moving parts all the time, and keeping everything straight is my biggest challenge and like going from having the hat on about you know talking about cellular biology and some kind of NIH grant submission and then immediately switching over and looking at like public policy and you know like having roles in those different areas.
It's a little ADD like you know I feel like that's my biggest challenges. I kind of have to switch lanes really quickly or switch tracks really quickly on a given day because there's a lot of different roles. But the best part about it is that I work with these different people in different institutions that have different skill sets and perspectives. And for me, that's extremely like energizing to talk to people that are so different. When I first took this job as the director for the Columbine Health Systems Center for Health and Aging. I was like talking to people that are like behavioral and social sciences and like I mean just they were blowing my mind with some of their insights and their ways they look at things and even they're just for example working with engineers because I like how they think so differently than people that are biology based in terms of you know we accept this amount of chaos that's occurring in a biologic system you know.
They have this like sort of formula approach to things and I cannot think the way they think, but I can be really inspired by their entire life approach that's so different than mine. And so the patient's part is the patient's with, I got to get my head around the next meeting and like, God, I got to switch from one thing that's completely different and then talk about something different and be completely engaged. That's the hard part. But the fun part is, yeah, There's so many different roles and perspectives and people that I'm going to interact with, so I enjoy that.
Dr. Venable: And that sounds really exciting, and it is neat, especially when you see how different people tick, right? Like how they think, how they work, and it sounds like everything you're doing with the aging project is really exciting. Are there any other, especially working with all these different individuals, any other specific things down the pipeline that you're really excited about?
Dr. Ehrhart: You know, for me, I think both in the human population and veterinary population, some of the biggest exciting things are around the concept of understanding the fundamental drivers of aging that has now allowed us to have real interventions and not just lifestyle stuff that you have to have done all your life to get the benefit. Talking about like therapeutics, like pharmaceutical ways in which we can target and modulate aging as well as, again, those things are also things that we've either been doing in cancer and now are applying them in a very different way or they're things that are so upstream of cancer that I think we're going to have broader impacts.
You know, again, looking at the common element between all the different age-related diseases that we get as we get older and thinking about how we can impact all of them simultaneously by looking at a target upstream of what happens in order to create those. I think we're in general, as clinicians, we are treating one disease at a time. We wait until a disease manifests, we diagnose it, and we treat it. But there may be a very different approach where instead of waiting until we have enough accumulated damage that results in some disease, right? Older bodies are made of older cells. Older cells don't function the same way. There's a time-dependent change in their function, and when enough of those cells accumulate, the system doesn't work. We recognize that as disease. But we can now know upstream of that disease that something's not right, and we can actually target that something. And how is that now going to impact the diagnosis of cancer? How is it going to impact the diagnosis? Like will we be able to live healthier for longer before we're burdened with these diseases of age, including cancer? And I think the answer to that is yes, and specifically like some very, very exciting things in the pipeline, things like senotherapeutics, different aspects of immune regeneration so that our immune systems are better able to detect cancer and fight cancer.
That's the kind of stuff that I think is gonna make the biggest health impacts in the clinic and those things are in trial now, like a lot of them, not many, but enough that I think we're gonna start seeing some real improvements in real impact in health, both in veterinary and human medicine. And quite frankly, I think we as veterinarians have a very, very pivotal role in that translation as we know in cancer, right? But I think also in the aging space too.
Dr. Venable: Yeah, that all sounds really exciting. And it's interesting to even think about aging in the way that you're talking, in the sense of like, can we even approach medicine differently? Like, can we try to prevent more, like you said, live longer, healthier lives before waiting for the disease to necessarily manifest? That's really exciting. That will be neat to see how things come along and things coming down the pipeline and veterinary and in people. So that will be really interesting.
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah, and I think One thing that the Center for Healthy Aging is kind of unique also is that we can run in parallel human and veterinary clinical trials. So it's not like it has to be done sequentially. And we've seen examples of that in human medicine, in veterinary medicine as well, specifically in cancer. I think veterinary oncology was pioneering in terms of really getting that comparative conversation off the ground. And for all of us who are involved in veterinary cancer work, it's really kind of obvious to us, but it's so interesting how the lack of understanding among the general medical field about the value of comparative medicine, and it's been surprisingly hard to get buy-in in the aging field about the dog as a very powerful model for human aging, you know because it took what 30 years or 40 years for that to even kind of be an accepted thing on the cancer side. It's almost like I'm starting from ground zero, although I will say that there's enough people now involved in cancer and aging that like the conversation is getting much easier. But I do think that there's still a lot of work to do and it is like pushing an elephant down a hallway at times.
Dr. Venable: Oh no. Well, you bring up so many good points, you know, as far as like the dog lives with us, you know, doesn't like socioeconomic, it's the same, you know, secondhand smoke or not or whatever they're exposed, you know? And yeah, I guess we just have to keep moving that conversation forward. But it is, but you know, whenever I talk to friends or family and mention, you know, about how the dog can be such a good model for cancer, they're always kind of blown away. Like I guess we are used to thinking and hearing about that just from our training and education. But yeah, most people just don't really think about the dog that way.
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah, and interestingly, like a fair number of oncologists also don't understand that. You would think that at least within our own discipline like you would have more, there'd be a wider understanding of that, but you know I still come across people that are like, "Wait, dogs, they get cancer and there's so much to educating people to really getting buy-in so that you can get the funding so that you can do the research." I mean, It's a lot, and I mean, the veterinary cancer field has done absolutely worlds of work to even get that conversation going. So I'm very proud to have come from that place and proud of the work that's ongoing with all of the people listening to the podcast here, yourself, everyone, I'm really proud of that. And I think the rings of impact spanning circle is happening as a result of all these past 30 years of work that's happened in veterinary cancer, in veterinary oncology. So I wanna say thank you because it's making the conversation easier. It's not easy yet on the aging side, but there's still, again, this interwoven story that continues to sort of play out and it's a really fun place to be at this point in my career.
Dr. Venable: It sounds very exciting. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing more and more of what you guys are discovering and how that ends up changing how we practice medicine. And I agree the conversations come a long way from 30-plus years ago of really getting oncology off the ground. It is exciting where we are today. So much different than even when I was in vet school. Things are just really advancing, which is really exciting. Hope we can keep moving that needle and, you know, getting more technology, more advancements to hopefully do better diagnosing, treating all those things with cancer and just disease in general, like you're saying, aging, something that everybody shares. So that's, that is really exciting. And, you know, as we're starting to kind of wrap up the podcast, one question I always ask everybody is if you can suggest somebody, that would be a good fit for the podcast.
Dr. Ehrhart: You know, I don't know if you've had a chance to talk to people like Yola Kirpenstein and others who were really early in the fellowship program, myself included, but really kind of got specialty, some people would call subspecialty or fellowship program trainings off the ground. It started at CSU but now as part of the ACVS kind of fabric. I'd love for you know to hear other people that talk about you know where is veterinary medicine going, especially in specialty areas and how do we continue to have a pipeline of people that are highly, highly trained to work in this really interdisciplinary field, which cancer is, I mean, it's radiation oncology, it's surgical oncology, it's medical oncology, it's immunology and being a leader in that space and being able to be fluent in these other areas, not just surgery, but like understanding how radiation fits into that, understanding how medical oncology does and ordering treatments to optimize. I think those are really interesting conversations and people like Yola or in others who have been really kind of pivotal in some of the early discussions about how to create fellowships in a way that allow young people to become leaders in these spaces that can really elevate the single discipline to be more multi-disciplinary and fit in.
Dr. Venable: Yeah that sounds like a great topic and it is important because I do think you know just even in veterinary medicine there's been a lot of talk about do we have enough vets or you know, and just even, yeah, looking at specialty and subspecialty. So I think that sounds great. We'll definitely reach out.
Dr. Ehrhart: Great. Yeah. And, you know, he's also an industry person, like, you know, thinking about industry and academia and private practice. And how is that going to play out in the next 10 years, you know, in the next 20 years? I think those are really interesting questions.
Dr. Venable: Yeah, yes, academia, industry, all this, it's all changing, you know, over time in the landscape. Thank you again so much. This has been really fascinating to hear and think about aging and cancer and just learn more about your story and your career. So I know our audience is all really going to enjoy hearing this and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Dr. Ehrhart: Yeah, thank you. It's been a great pleasure, and I look forward to listening to more episodes of the podcast. Thanks.
Dr. Venable: Well, that's it for this episode of the Veterinary Cancer Pioneers podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and gained valuable insight, we would be so grateful if you could share our podcast with your friends and colleagues. And it would be even more wonderful if you want to give us a five-star rating, positive review, or any kind of feedback on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. The Veterinary Cancer Pioneers Podcast is presented to you by ImpriMed.