This year, almost 6 million dogs in the U.S. will receive a cancer medical diagnosis. That’s roughly three times greater than the variety of Americans who will be identified with cancer this year, although people are approximated to surpass animal dogs by almost 4 to 1.
Yet the hereditary resemblances in between human and dog cancers might point the method to treatments that can save lives on both ends of the leash.
Most of the dogs that establish cancer this year won’t receive any treatment for their illness. Those that do will mainly be placed on a chemotherapy program, a one-size-fits-all treatment that does little to detain the relentless march of their fatal disease.
It doesn’t need to be in this manner. For years, researchers have actually understood that dogs react well to cancer treatments that target particular anomalies in their growths. The factor is that dog and human cancers have a lot in typical — they are genetically homologous, take place naturally at comparable rates, and react to the exact same treatments. Dogs are, to put it simply, about as best a design of human cancers that we might expect. But till just recently they have actually been an untapped resource in our battle versus cancer.
In 2019, One Health — a business among us, Christina, established and runs as CEO, and where James is AI designer — started building what has actually ended up being the world’s biggest dog cancer clinico-genomic dataset, which is distinct not simply for its size however the quality of info it consists of. Over the course of the previous 3 years, we have actually gathered genomic information from the growths of more than 4,000 dogs being dealt with for cancer at 900 veterinarian centers throughout the nation. Earlier this year, we released information on a subset of 1,100 dogs in a study in Nature Precision Oncology. Each of the dogs in the paper — and in the complete dataset, which includes brand-new dogs weekly — is someone’s animal, and among our objectives was to help recognize the most appealing treatments for each cherished member of the family. To make it take place, we utilize One Health’s FidoCure platform to series the growth DNA of every dog in our information set, make it possible for access to treatments by means of a drug store partner, tape-record their treatment, and monitor their result.
When we evaluated the information, we were amazed by what we discovered. Hidden amongst the constellation of more than 1.2 billion information points in our canine cancer database was an apparent pattern that revealed simply how carefully the canine human cancer journey mirrors our own. Dog clients establish the exact same kinds of cancers as people at incredibly comparable rates, they react to the exact same cancer drugs, and they have the exact same diagnosis. Oncologists have actually understood that dogs are an excellent design of human cancers for years, however they mainly concentrated on separated resemblances, such as the comparable structure of dog and human cancer cells. Our information recommends that the canine cancer client’s journey — from medical diagnosis to treatment to result — is almost similar to the human cancer journey.
But there was an even larger surprise hiding in our information. By utilizing information science and AI, we had the ability to recognize a mate of canine cancer clients that had actually received “off-label” cancer drugs and saw an impressive boost in their mean survival times — sometimes extending their anticipated life-spans by an element of 3. This was impressive since all of these animal clients were getting little particle cancer drugs, a kind of treatment that is coupled with particular hereditary anomalies discovered in growths. These little particle drugs were initially created for human clients, however since dog and human cancers are so comparable our canine buddies can gain from them, too.
There’s an essential distinction in dealing with canine cancer clients with little particle drugs, nevertheless. Whereas the drugs that oncologists can prescribe a human cancer patient are generally restricted by the drug’s FDA-approved label to the type of cancer they have, vet oncologists aren’t similarly limited to such rigorous “quality of care” standards. Vets can — and do — prescribe the treatment they think will be most effective for their patients in consultation with pet parents. For example, there is some evidence that dasatinib, which is used to treat a type of leukemia that exhibits T315I mutations, may also be effective at dealing with cancers with BRCA mutations, which is typically associated with breast cancer. For humans, however, dasatinib is available only to treat leukemia. But if a vet is treating a canine patient with breast cancer, they may decide to use dasatinib if other treatments aren’t working or are unavailable because canine clients aren’t bound by the same legal restrictions on treatments as humans.
An individual vet might prescribe an “extra-label” little-particle drug to a dog with a specific type of tumor mutation only a few times a year. But this is happening dozens, if not hundreds of times for this tumor type across all veterinary clinics. What our study showed is that if we can capture the genomic and treatment data for these dogs, it can help us quickly home in on the most promising new applications of existing drugs for human cancer patients by extending the FDA-approved drug label. If we could collect and analyze data from all the canine cancer patients being treated in America’s 30,000 vet clinics, we could essentially run a continuous and massive “clinical study” using real patients in real world settings.
The relative freedom of a veterinarian to choose the types of therapies their pet patients receive presents an enormous opportunity to accelerate the development of cancer drugs. Today, the way that human cancer drugs are discovered is mostly through trial-and-error and relies heavily on testing new drug candidates in mice, which leave a lot to be desired as cancer models. Bringing a new human cancer drug to market is a lengthy and expensive process that can take upwards of a decade and cost billions of dollars. And by one estimate97% of new cancer drug candidates fail out of clinical trials well before they ever make it to market. That’s a lot of time, energy, and resources we can’t afford to waste in our fight against cancer.
What our study suggested, however, is that by providing canine cancer patients with existing cancer drugs and carefully tracking their genetic profiles and outcomes, it’s possible to identify novel uses of existing drugs and the most promising cancer drug candidates for a human trial. Rather than the current drug development paradigm of searching for a needle in a haystack, our approach brushes the haystack aside to reveal the needle. Using only a relatively small cohort of 1,000 dogs and 10 small molecule-drugs, we were already able to identify promising new treatment applications for two of those existing drugs. By using this data, oncologists can fast-track these drugs for human clinical trials and, if those trials are successful, get these drugs into the bodies of human cancer patients who need them — all in record time.
Pharmaceutical companies are starting to pay attention to this new drug development paradigm. One of the first to recognize the potential of canine cancer client data was Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that used our platform to launch a study to see whether one of their existing cancer treatments, a drug called eribulin used to treat breast cancer and liposarcoma, might also be effective in treating angiosarcoma. Buoyed by the promising results of our collaborative study, Eisai was able to quickly launch a human clinical trial, which is now in Phase II only three years after we published our initial results.
Comparative oncology — the study of canine cancer patients as models of human cancer — is a burgeoning area of research that has attracted increasing research interest and federal funding. In 2017, the National Cancer Institute awarded $11.5 million in grants to six veterinary schools to study cancer immunotherapies in pet dogs, which has already led to two Phase 1 clinical trials in humans led by researchers at the University of Minnesota and the University of Colorado. In 2022, the NCI expanded its comparative oncology program to six other veterinary schools. We’re optimistic that this program will continue to produce important new discoveries about both human and dog cancers.
One Health isn’t the only company working on bridging the gap between canine and human oncology. For starters, the blockbuster human cancer drug Imbruvica was helped by a clinical trial in pet dogs with cancer run at Colorado State Vet School. Over the past few years, a growing number of startups have pioneered incredible new ways to leverage precision diagnostic and treatment techniques from human oncology to advance the treatment of pet cancer patients. ImpriMed, for example, is focused on personalized treatment selection starting with the pets and moving to humans. Meanwhile, a company called Anivive has repurposed a human cancer drug for canine cancer and Basepaws is building a unique database for cat cancer patients.
But most comparative oncology work on canine cancer patients involve relatively restricted clinical trials, which limits their effectiveness in advancing precision cancer treatments for dogs and humans. To make that happen, we need a lot more data — and the best way to get it is by bringing the research to canine cancer patients.
Today, most veterinary clinics aren’t collecting the vital genomic data on canine cancer patients that is needed to provide the most efficient care for their clients and drive new insights on effective therapies. The reason for this is that until recently collecting genomic data and analyzing it with machine learning systems was prohibitively expensive for veterinarians. But as the cost of genetic sequencing and big data analysis continues to plummetwe can no longer afford to ignore this vital tool in our fight against cancer.
Pet owners needn’t be concerned that they’re footing the bill for drug development at major pharmaceutical companies or turning their pets into research subjects, either. If a pharma company wants to enroll canine patients in a clinical trial using the FidoCure platform, the company pays the full cost of trial just as it would in a human trial. It’s up to dog owners to decide if they want to enroll their animal.
Our dogs are our best friends in sickness and in health, and by making potent new treatments available to canine cancer clients, collecting their genomic information, and monitoring their outcome we can usher in a brand-new paradigm of cancer drug advancement that has the capacity to save countless lives on both ends of the leash.
Christina Lopes is CEO of One Health. James Zou is a teacher at Stanford University.
