“‘When you adopt a dog, you’re adopting future heartbreak,’ said Emilie Adams, a New Yorker who owns three Rhodesian Ridgebacks. ‘It’s worth it over time because you just have so much love between now and when they go. But their life spans are shorter than ours.’

In recent years, scientists have been chasing after drugs that might stave off this heartbreak by extending the lives of our canine companions. On Tuesday, the biotech company Loyal announced that it had moved one step closer to bringing one such drug to market. ‘The data you provided are sufficient to show that there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness,’ an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration informed the company in a recent letter. (Loyal provided a copy of the letter to The Times.)

That means that the drug, which Loyal declined to identify for proprietary reasons, has met one of the requirements for ‘expanded conditional approval,’ a fast-tracked authorization for animal drugs that fulfill unmet health needs and require difficult clinical trials.”

From New York Times.