Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Tisha Harper (center), an assistant professor of surgery at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, uses a robotic dog as a patient while teaching veterinary students bandaging techniques in a classroom laboratory Thursday.

Special Touch cleaning contractors wash exterior windows at the new Infectious Disease Research Facility at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.

Veterinary medicine students (from left) Christina Stancliff, Elena MacBride and Christian Fitzgibbon work on a robotic dog while learning bandage techniques at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg.

BLACKSBURG -- Becoming a veterinarian hasn't been this exciting since Alf Wight came home to the Yorkshire Dales after World War II.

Under the pseudonym James Herriot, Wight chronicled the medical revolution of antibiotics and steroids developed during that war, and the stunning changes they brought to the practice of animal medicine.

Today's Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine professors and students -- many of them inspired by the famous Herriot stories -- are themselves leaping forward, working on new technologies and treatments to heal sick animals, and humans.

To facilitate these changes, the veterinary college is expanding its reach and its collaboration with several other Tech colleges. That includes new programs and curriculums and three new buildings, the first of which is scheduled to open in November. A second is under construction, and a third is in the planning stages.

As its facilities expand, the college hopes to increase and diversify its student body. Today, incoming classes average about 95 students, with about 80 percent of them being female.

With new facilities, college Dean Gerhardt Schurig said he hopes to increase incoming classes to about 120, and to boost the diversity of the student body by recruiting more blacks, among other groups.

With curriculum changes led by associate dean and microbiologist Jenny Hodgson, the school is developing several career tracks outside of traditional companion animal practice for doctor of veterinary medicine students.

The changes are preparing graduates for roles in animal and public health, as well as food safety, Hodgson said.

Administrators expect about 1,500 federal jobs to open up in the coming decades as U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarians retire, Schurig said.

Those veterinarians oversee the safety of the country's food supply.

In fact, public health and animal health are linked in complex ways, Schurig said. Evidence of this nexus can already be found in the college, which is home to Tech's new public health master's degree program.

A seemingly odd combination to outsiders, the public health degree acknowledges that diseases that arise in animal populations -- such as the virus popularly known as bird flu -- can spread rapidly through human populations, Schurig said.

Schurig came to Tech in 1978 from Chile, where his German parents had immigrated, and where he was trained as a veterinarian.

Just as diseases can jump from animals to humans, treatments for animal disease can lead to new treatments for humans, Schurig said.

In his long career Schurig helped improve a vaccine that has effectively eradicated the brucellosis bacteria, which causes spontaneous abortion in cattle. Humans infected with brucellosis suffer debilitating flulike symptoms that can recur over many years -- a disease contracted by Wight and recounted in the Herriot novels as the author's "funny turns."

Schurig remembers the vet school's humble beginnings in a trailer on campus, and has seen it grow over the past 25 years into a 137,000-square-foot college and teaching hospital, and now is overseeing another rapid expansion.

A $14.1 million, 30,000-square-foot Veterinary Medicine Instruction Addition is set to open next month, and construction is under way on a $10.5 million, 16,000-square-foot Infectious Disease Research Facility.

Additionally, planning is under way for a joint Translational Medicine Building, which would expand the veterinary hospital and house veterinary research laboratories, as well as labs for researchers from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Science.

The Translational Medicine Building would bring together researchers and clinicians from across the university to work at the intersection of human and animal health, Schurig said.

This type of collaboration -- alternately known as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary -- is repeated as a mantra by administrators across Tech's colleges and departments.

These kinds of collaborations include a dizzying array of specialities, from computer science, engineering and physics to microbiology and immunology, and are expected to help Tech cash in on new trends in federal biomedical research funding.

The National Institutes of Health, which funds a large portion of university research across the country, prioritizes grant applications from schools with both medical and veterinary programs, Schurig said.

Vet school researchers at Tech now are working on several medical treatments that show promise in animals, as well as humans.

Brain tumors such as the one that killed Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2009 also occur in dogs. The vet school's scientists and doctors are working on a promising treatment for dogs that could guide development of similar treatment for people, said Frank Pearsall, development director for the vet school and an alumnus of its first graduating class.

Pearsall said he is also excited about advancements in research on new stem cell treatments.

Rather than use embryonic stem cells, which are fragile and politically controversial, vet school scientists are developing techniques using mature stem cells extracted from a sick patient, grown in a laboratory and reinjected as a treatment.

"Regenerative medicine is the future," he said.

This approach has shown promise in healing animal patients, and Pearsall said it could prove to be as important an advance as antibiotic therapy was more than 60 years ago.