We now know that even people that don’t smoke can still get lung cancer and so can our dogs.
There are many women who develop a particular type of breast cancer by the gene–HER2–, this same gene also appears to be the cause of lung cancer in many dogs, according to a new study of pet dogs led by the Translational Genomics Institute ( TGen ), an affiliate of the City of Hope, and Ohio State University.
Recently published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, this study could have significant implications for people who have never smoked.
Ohio State and TGen found that neratinib — a drug that has successfully been used to battle human beast cancer — might also work for many of the nearly 40,000 dogs in the U.S. that annually develop the most common type of canine lung cancer, known as canine pulmonary adenocarcinoma, or CPAC.
According to Dr. Will Hendricks, the novel HER2 mutation was found in nearly half of dogs with CPAC. He said we now have a candidate therapeutic opportunity for a large proportion of dogs with lung cancer.
Now based on these results, a clinical trial using neratinib is planned for dogs with naturally occurring lung cancer that have the HER2 mutation.
According to Dr. Wendy Lorch, an Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences at the Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, “this is the first precision medicine clinical trial for dogs with lung cancer, which means, the selection of cancer therapy for a particular patient that is based on the genomic profile of the patient’s tumor and matched with agents that are known to specially target the identified mutation.
The team at Ohio State University has worked for years to find treatments for canine lung cancer.
CPAC is an aggressive disease that clinically resembles human lung cancer among never- smokers. There is no standard-of-care treatment for CPAC and prior to the work performed by the TGen – Ohio state team — little was known of the disease’s gentic underpinnings.
“These results are the first example of our efforts to adapt genomics tools from the human world, such as gene sequencing and liquid biopsies, to generate novel insights in canine cancers, with mutual benefit for both,” said Dr. Muhammed Murtaza, Assistant Professor and C0-Director of TGen’s Center for Noninvasive Diagnostics.