Man's Best Friend Joins the Fight Against Cancer

New canine tumor tissue bank will help save dog and human lives, experts say.

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, May 28, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, May 28 (HealthDay News) -- Alex doesn't know it, but the 12-year-old golden retriever is actually a hero of cancer research.

"When she was about 10, we noticed that she started to limp," said her owner, Kevin Darling, an IT professional living near Columbus, Ohio. "She had the beginning stages of osteosarcoma -- bone cancer."

Because the tumor was confined to Alex's left front leg, veterinarians recommended amputating the limb and then giving the dog chemo. "They said she probably had a 50 percent chance of living one year," said Darling, 45.

He took that chance, and nearly three years later, Alex, minus one front leg, is still "full-tilt running, keeping up with my other dogs," Darling said.

And the bone cancer? A tiny piece of it, along with blood samples from a number of Alex's littermates and other relatives, is slated to become part of the first U.S. canine tumor tissue bank in Frederick, Md. The bank -- formally called a "biospecimen repository" -- began accepting the first of a projected 3,000 canine biopsy samples on May 1.

The new facility lies adjacent to the U.S. National Cancer Institute's own library of human cancer samples. That's no accident -- the canine tissue bank is the dream of a group of researchers who know that malignancies that occur spontaneously in dogs hold vital clues to human cancer.

"The cells of the dog are actually very, very similar to our own cells in terms of their genetic makeup," explained Dr. Matthew Breen, an associate professor of genomics at the college of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Breen is also the treasurer of the nonprofit Canine Comparative Oncology Genomics Consortium (CCOGC), the driving force behind the tissue bank.

The mapping of both the dog and human genomes over the past decade "has shown very clearly that humans and dogs are very closely related," Breen said. "The gene that causes brown eyes in you is probably the gene that causes brown eyes in a dog."

Dogs share something else with humans that makes them ideal models for cancer research, added Dr. Jaime Modiano, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and a CCOGC board member.