Studying Dogs Alongside Humans, to Develop Cancer Drugs for Both

National Cancer Institute researchers are undertaking a project to conduct comparative oncology drug trials in humans and dogs, with the hopes of providing an improved perspective upon how clinical drugs will perform in later-stage trials. An offshoot of the project is to accelerate the development of efficacious cancer drugs for dogs. The Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium maps out its mission in the Public Library of Science online. Here is some of the rationale behind their work:

Current drug development pathways are frequently unidirectional. Novel agents are assessed in conventional preclinical models of efficacy and toxicity before moving into human clinical trials where they either fail or succeed. Particularly with novel targeted therapies the conventional paradigms of toxicity studies conducted in healthy animals followed by Phase I and Phase II human trials leave unanswered many important questions on the “best use” of these drugs [6]. Translational drug development studies in pet dogs with cancer provide an opportunity to answer these questions by serving as an intermediary between conventional preclinical models and human clinical trials [7]–[9]. In these dogs, cancers develop naturally in the context of an intact immune system and with a syngeneic host and tumor microenvironment. Similar environmental, nutrition, age, sex, and reproductive factors lead to tumor development and progression in human and canine cancers. They share similar features such as histologic appearance, tumor genetics, biological behavior, molecular targets, therapeutic response, and unfortunately, acquired resistance, recurrence, and metastasis.

--Paul Thomas