Man returns dogs’ bones.
Transplants of bone marrow, perfected in canine tests, will soon treat their cancers.
The bone marrow or stem-cell transplant, a procedure that every year saves tens of thousands of lives and won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the Seattle physician who pioneered it, appears poised to come full circle and finally become more widely available to those who first made it all possible.
Dogs.
“They helped us figure out how to help save ourselves, and so this represents a big give-back to the canine species,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bryan, a veterinary oncologist at Washington State University.
Bryan is spearheading a project to soon launch what would be the world’s first large-scale clinical transplant program for dogs. The program is expected to become available to treat dogs with lymphoma some time this summer.
Bone marrow transplants had been done experimentally in dogs over the decades, Bryan said, and clinically for a few dogs by some pioneering private-practice veterinarians.
But the procedure has never before been routinely offered as a cancer therapy for the canine community, he said.
“We are looking at this as an option for dealing with one of the most common cancers in dogs,” Bryan said. “There are tens of thousands of dogs diagnosed with lymphoma every year. At WSU, we get five or six calls a week.”
The WSU transplant program, which will be a partnership with a private business based in North Carolina, is intended to make the procedures available to pet owners for about $15,000 to $20,000 per dog.
That’s pricey, Bryan acknowledged, but there appears to be enough demand among pet owners to support the program.
“We could never have done this in the first place without dogs,” said Dr. Rainer Storb, head of transplant biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and one of the original members of the team of scientists led by Nobel winner Dr. E. Donnall Thomas that worked to perfect the procedure in humans during the 1960s and ’70s.
It’s not just that the scientists happened to work with dogs when the research started, Storb said.
Dogs—unlike mice or monkeys or any other animals in research—turned out to be uniquely qualified to serve as animal models for the experimental human bone marrow transplant, he said, in part because of their broad genetic diversity.
“It is the only species other than humans that has such a large spectrum of genetic diversity,” Storb said. Just consider the difference between a dachshund and a Great Dane, he said, and you get the picture. “They also suffer many of the same diseases as humans.”
By 1965, when Storb moved from Europe to Seattle to work with Thomas and his team, most researchers had concluded that bone marrow transplantation would never work.
All of the earlier experimental attempts had failed miserably in people, usually because of immune system rejection.
But the Seattle team believed it could be done and, working with veterinarians, recruited dog owners to help advance the science.
The first clue dogs gave for making transplantation work was identifying that a close tissue match between the marrow donor and the patient was critical, Storb said.
“This was not the case in mice,” he said. “We only discovered this because of the dogs. And they also showed us it wasn’t the entire solution.”
Research in dogs helped the Seattle scientists figure out how to reduce the risk of immune system rejection and led to the first successful human bone marrow transplants.
Storb continues to work with dogs and is now doing studies, all of them non-lethal, aimed at eliminating the need for radiation and toxic chemotherapy altogether.
“Dogs are still important to this science,” Storb said.
via Chicago Tribune/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Maureen Adams
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