Jellybean continues defy expectations. The 5-year-old Labrador Retriever mix hops up from her favorite spot on the couch and walks across the front room as easily as if she never had metastatic cancer. Its owners, Patricia and Zach Mendonca, still cannot consider the miracle. “He’s slightly more tense,” says Patricia.
Almost three years ago, Jellybean was diagnosed with bone cancer in his hind paw. Despite the amputation and chemotherapy, the cancer cells quickly spread through her bloodstream to her lungs, as they do in 90 percent of cases in dogs. The average survival time at this stage is 2 months. “We had no hope of curing her,” says Patricia. “We were quite devastated.”
So in November 2020, the Mendoncas enrolled Jellybean in a clinical trial at Tufts University, about an hour’s drive from their home in Rhode Island, USA. Jellybean got three pills without spending a dime that the Mendoncas stuffed into her favorite chicken-flavored treats every single day. By Christmas, Jellybean’s tumors began to shrink and haven’t returned since. The response surprised even veterinarians treating Jellybean and raised hopes that these drugs could help not only other dogs, but in addition people.
Jellybean bone cancer, osteosarcoma, also affects humans – especially children and youths. Fortunately, it is comparatively rare: around 26,000 latest cases are diagnosed worldwide every year. The problem is that there have been no latest treatments for greater than 35 years, says veterinary oncologist Amy LeBlanc, and people available should not very effective. Osteosarcoma patients only have a survival rate about 30 percent if the cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body.
Dog research, comparable to the Jellybean trial, could change all that. Cancers in puppies are molecularly and microscopically much like human cancers, and within the case of osteosarcoma, the similarities are striking. When compared under a microscope, the canine tissue sample and the human tumor tissue sample are indistinguishable. But while it’s thankfully rare in humans, osteosarcoma is no less than 10 times more common in dogs – which suggests there are an enormous variety of canine cancer patients helping research and drug testing. “The families and dogs that participate are a vital piece of the puzzle in advancing research,” says Cheryl London, a veterinary oncologist at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, who treats Jellybean.
Importantly, dogs should not subject to the identical federal laws that restrict human treatment options; veterinarians have rather more freedom to make use of existing drugs off-label against diseases for which there are currently no good treatments. All of this makes clinical trials faster and cheaper.
These trials are a part of it Lunar Cancer Shot an initiative that US President Joe Biden relaunched last yr and for which he asked Congress for added support $2.8 billion within the 2024 budget. “They are designed to fill a knowledge gap that just isn’t sufficiently filled by traditional studies in mice or data that can’t yet be easily collected in humans,” says LeBlanc, who directs the Comparative Oncology Program on the U.S. National Cancer Institute. The program oversees clinical trials on dogs with cancer which might be conducted by Tufts and 21 other veterinary universities within the USA and Canada.
