Cancer Clinic Opens Its Door to Fido and Missy

No, they haven’t run out of people with cancer to treat. And no, they aren’t starting a UC Davis-style veterinary training program.

So why was UCLA Medical Center letting that golden retriever sniff around its room-sized cobalt radiation machine on Tuesday?

Turns out that UCLA radiation oncology experts were opening a $1.5-million cancer treatment center. For dogs and cats.

University technicians will run the clinic for a private Westside veterinary hospital. And this is no public money boon-dog-gle, officials insisted: That’s because the university hopes to make a profit with its pet treatments within five years.

Turning over the surplus, state-owned radiation machine and a small campus building to animals will have another benefit, officials said. From now on, Los Angeles-area veterinarians won’t have to sneak dogs and cats into hospitals at night for surreptitious cancer treatments on humans’ machines.

“There’s a huge demand for this type of treatment for pets. We’ve had a number of patients and staff ask if we could treat animals with our equipment,” said Dr. Rodney Withers, a UCLA clinical research professor and head of the medical center’s radiation oncology department.

The answer in the past has always been no because the policy of most human hospitals is to prohibit the treatment of pets, Withers said.

UCLA’s agreement with Veterinary Centers of America Inc. will allow veterinarians from the company’s West Los Angeles Animal Hospital to direct the treatment. The closest radiation therapy facilities for pets are private clinics in Fountain Valley and Phoenix and at veterinary school-run centers at UC Davis and Colorado State University, officials said.

Dr. Edward Gillette, an expert on radiation oncology in veterinary medicine at Colorado State’s Fort Collins campus, will instruct UCLA technicians in how to calibrate their cobalt machine for pets. He said he has never seen a veterinary clinic arrangement like UCLA’s.

But “I really don’t see it as a gift of public funds. UCLA will recover its investment,” Gillette said.

The golden retriever sniffing around the 26-year-old radiation machine was Rio, a 2-year-old owned by Robert and Michelle Pope of Woodland Hills. They said they wish the UCLA pet clinic had been open when they sought cancer treatment for their dog.

Instead, their vet at the West Los Angeles Animal Hospital referred Rio to a veterinarian in Norwalk who sneaked him into a human hospital.

“We had to go in the back door after dark,” said Robert Pope. “But Rio’s prognosis is good.”