Animal advocates Karen Waldron and Shawn Ricci thought they were going to lose their cat.
Beckham, a cat they’ve now had for 13 years, had suddenly become uncoordinated and stopped eating and drinking.
But thanks to the care he received from Dr. Joanne Tuohy at Virginia Tech’s Animal Cancer Care and Research Center, who found and treated the tumors in his ear, Beckham made a full recovery.
Now Waldron and Ricci are supporting future cancer treatment and research for pets and people alike with a $15 million gift to the Animal Cancer Care and Research Center in Roanoke.
The gift, announced Sunday, is the largest ever donated to the cancer center and one of the largest gifts ever to the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
Waldron and Ricci are long-time supporters of the veterinary school and its work.
In 2025, they gave $4 million toward an expansion of the school’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Blacksburg.
“Over the years, we’ve had many, many animals that have had varying forms of cancer. Veterinarians make the diagnosis, and there’s a referral, but the referral in the past has often been a great distance away,” Ricci said in a news release.
“We’ve been fortunate that we can take time off, get the hotel and stay with the animal undergoing treatment. But it is really wonderful for people in this area to get that referral and go just 20, 30 minutes up the road, and they don’t have to worry about finding hotels, finding babysitters for their kids. It’s a much less traumatizing experience for people to be able to have local care of this quality.”
Ricci, a former equestrian vaulter, and his wife, Waldron, own and operate Bent Tree Farm, a horse breeding and training center in Shawsville.
In addition to their cat, another one of their pets — a dog who was abandoned on the road near their farm — has also been successfully treated at the cancer center.
Lafayette, the dog, had large lumps in his throat that turned out to be thyroid cancer.
“We went to see Dr. Tuohy, and she said she couldn’t make any predictions about how the surgery was going to go because the tumors were rather large,” Ricci said. “He had his thyroid and parathyroid removed, and because of follow-up treatments and the chemotherapy, he has been living an absolutely fantastic life. You would not know anything was wrong with this dog.”
Dogs and cats, and even other animals, suffer from some of the same types of cancer as people, so research and clinical trials performed at the cancer center often are translational, or can inform and guide advancements in cancer treatment for people too.
“The research on our patients that have cancer helps people because the cancers in pets and people are, sadly, very similar,” Tuohy, an associate professor of surgical oncology, said in the release. “So what we learn from our pets with cancer can also then be applied to people with the same type of cancer. We can also learn from people with cancer in the other direction, back to our pets with cancer as well.”
The $15 million gift will be split evenly between clinical and research support and will help fund endowments for three professorships — a medical oncologist, a radiologist and a surgical oncologist — and the hiring of a research director to support translational cancer research, among other staff and support.
Chief Medical Officer Beatrix Manning said the funding will help the cancer center expand its capacity and allow it to accept more patients beyond the seven to 10 new consultations it currently sees each week.
M. Daniel Givens, dean of the veterinary college, said the funding gives both the school and the cancer center the ability to recruit talented veterinarians and researchers.
“Karen and Shawn understood something important: The equipment and the building matter, but it’s the people — the clinicians, the technicians, the researchers — who make this kind of compassionate and cutting-edge care possible,” Givens said in a release.
