Every two to three months, Elizabeth Roberts says goodbye to her kids and husband and loads up Scooby Doo, the family's three-legged, 12-year-old Labrador retriever, into the back of her SUV. She drives to the ferry from where they live on Martha's Vineyard and takes the 45-minute boat ride to the mainland.

From there, she has another six to seven hour drive to her parents' home outside Philadelphia, where she and Scooby Doo spend the night before driving to University of Pennsylvania in the morning. All this for an experimental osteosarcoma clinical trial that has extended Scooby Doo's life expectancy from one year to going on three years now.

"Knock on wood, Scoob is still doing great," Roberts says.

The treatment is working so well, in fact, that the FDA has approved a trial in children who develop a similar cancer. It is the latest advancement in animal research that is making its way into human medicine.

As dogs and cats become more like family members to pet owners, veterinary medicine has become increasingly like human medicine. Vet schools offer specialty training like oncology, nutrition and orthopedics; cutting-edge therapeutic treatments like 3D-printed bones and stem cell therapy were developed to help ensure our pets have long and healthy lives.