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Your dog is the secret weapon in the fight against cancer


Jellybean continues despite expectations. The 5-year-old Labrador retriever mix jumps up and down from her favorite spot on the couch and walks around the living room with ease as if she’d never had metastatic cancer. Her owners, Patricia and Zach Mendonca, still can’t believe the miracle. Patricia said: “She has a little bit of difficulty in her walk.

Jellybean was diagnosed with bone cancer in his hind legs nearly three years ago. Despite amputation and chemotherapy, the cancer cells quickly spread through the bloodstream to her lungs, as in 90% of cases in dogs. The average survival time at this stage is two months. Patricia said: “We have no hope of curing her. “We were pretty devastated.”

So in November 2020, the Mendoncas family enrolled Jellybean in a clinical trial at Tufts University, about an hour’s drive from their home in Rhode Island, USA. Jellybean was given a free trio of pills that the Mendoncas house stuffed into her favorite chicken flavored dish. By Christmas, Jellybean’s tumors started to shrink and they haven’t come back since. This reaction surprised even the veterinarians who treated Jellybean and raised hopes that the drugs could not only help other dogs but humans as well.

Jellybean bone cancer, osteosarcoma, also affects people—especially children and adolescents. Fortunately, it’s relatively rare: About 26,000 new cases are diagnosed worldwide each year. Veterinary oncologist Amy LeBlanc says the problem is that there haven’t been any new treatments in more than 35 years, and existing ones aren’t very effective either. Bone cancer patients have a survival rate of only about 30 percent if the cancer cells spread to other parts of the body.

Dog studies, like the Jellybean trial, can change all this. Cancers arising in pet dogs are molecularly and microscopically similar to cancers in humans — in the case of bone cancer, the similarities are striking. When compared under the microscope, the canine tissue sample and the human tissue sample of the tumor were indistinguishable. But while very rare in humans, bone cancer is at least 10 times more common in dogs — meaning there are plenty of canine cancer patients to help with research and drug testing. Cheryl London, a veterinary oncologist at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, who is treating Jellybean, said: “Families and participating dogs are an important part of the puzzle in life. moving this research forward.

Importantly, dogs are not subject to the same federal regulations that limit treatment options for humans; Veterinarians have much more freedom to use existing off-label medications to combat diseases for which there are currently no good treatments. All told, this makes clinical trials faster and cheaper.

Such tests are part of Moonshot Cancer initiative that US president Joe Biden restarted last year and whereby he asked Congress to provide more $2.8 billion in the 2024 budget. “They are designed to fill a knowledge gap that traditional studies in mice have found,” said LeBlanc, who directs the Comparative Cancer Program at the US National Cancer Institute. or data cannot be adequately collected in humans. Program to oversee clinical trials in dogs with cancer, conducted by Tufts and 21 other veterinary colleges in the US and Canada.

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