On any given day, Sara Pracht may be carefully packing tumor samples into a box and personally driving the specimens to a lab for analysis, or counseling pet owners about what to expect when their beloved dog undergoes cancer treatment.

Running a clinical trial requires a meticulously orchestrated operation. When you’re running as many as a dozen trials at a time, and the studies have implications for both animal and human medicine, “that presents unique logistical issues,” says Pracht, a certified veterinary technician and coordinator of the Canine Brain Tumor Program (CBTP) in the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM).

Pracht, who has been managing clinical trials for 20 years, is up to the task. In addition to coordinating clinical trials at the CBTP, Pracht is the lead research professional and supervisor of CVM’s Veterinary Clinical Investigation Center (CIC).

“I’ve done pre-clinical research, cancer clinical trials, and everything in between,” Pracht says. All the work follows strict standards that ensure trustworthy, high-quality, and ethical studies.  

Recruiting patients far and wide

The CBTP is a CVM program that closely collaborates with other University of Minnesota (UMN) specialties, including the UMN School of Medicine and the Masonic Cancer Center—all with the goal of advancing glioma prevention and treatment in both humans and their dogs. The aggressive brain tumors occur in both humans and dogs at about the same rate, and in both species, a glioma diagnosis carries a poor long-term prognosis. There are no other species that get these tumors as dogs and people do.

This provides an unparalleled opportunity to conduct clinical trials that span specialties.

“I’m super passionate about it because not only are we able to help animals that have devastating brain tumors but also everything we have learned we have been able to translate into human medicine,” Pracht says.

With a team of four veterinary technicians and one veterinary technician assistant, Pracht, and CBTP Director and veterinary neurologist/neurosurgeon Susan Arnold, the CBTP is always recruiting patients for clinical trials that test life-extending therapies for glioma. Patients have come from as far away as South America or England.

“Owners and clients are traveling here for surgery, treatment, and participation, and there are so many logistics involved in that,” Pracht says. “It’s not just scheduling their appointments here at the Veterinary Medical Center, but also coordinating with the School of Medicine, helping families book their travel, and accounting for flight delays.”

The job involves a lot of thinking on her feet. In 2024, when the CBTP’s MRI machine was down, Pracht had to quickly arrange for clinical trial participants to travel to nearby practices to receive scans.

Beyond cancer care

Pracht says caring for patients, who usually have a terminal diagnosis, also involves caring for their owners.

“Our goal is to give these pets the longest, most productive time that they can have left, but sometimes it doesn’t always work out,” she says. “Owners have hope that the treatment will work, and it can be daunting, but also very rewarding, getting to work with patients who, without treatment, would be dead within a couple of months, and we can give them 1.5 years.”

Pracht says she always puts herself in the shoes of her patients’ owners.

“Their animals are part of their family, and they are often still just grasping the diagnosis because it comes on so fast," she says. "They put so much money and time into coming here. The job is not just coordinating the logistics on our side, but managing their expectations and emotions.”

Wearing many hats

The CBTP works closely with labs at the UMN School of Medicine, and it’s Pracht’s duty to ensure everything from tumor samples to temperature-sensitive vaccines is transported safely between the Twin Cities—and that every last dose is accounted for.

Sometimes, patients in the trials receive experimental transfusions that have shown promise in keeping gliomas from growing. In these cases, Pracht and her team diligently collect, process, and ship samples from the CBTP to other labs. Without those samples, the integrity of the trial—which relies on blood samples to determine how much of the experimental drug is in a dog’s system—crumbles.

When a patient with the CBTP undergoes brain surgery, Pracht works not only with Arnold but also Matthew Hunt, a neurosurgeon at the School of Medicine, who scrubs in on all of the program’s surgeries.

The work is detail-oriented, fast-paced, and leaves no room for error—but it's worth it.

“It’s so cool to not only help these dogs have a better quality of life, but also change the devastating outcomes for people with brain tumors,” Pracht says. “We may be able to get there faster because we’re working together.”