Transcriber: Gabriela Moreno Polacov Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Raise your hands if you own a dog.
Get them up.
One third of those dogs will get cancer.
But they can help us find a cure.
We all know a friend, a family member or a colleague
who has battled the disease,
but it might surprise you to learn that dogs get cancer too.
In fact, one in three pet dogs get cancer.
And this is what happened to my patient Griffin.
But imagine being forced into the position
which providing that cancer treatment for your best mate,
a boisterous, adorable young Rottweiler, would risk the safety of your baby girl.
That’s precisely the situation that Griffin’s owner, Adam, faced
when four-year-old Griffin
unexpectedly developed an aggressive cancer invading his skin.
Adam swung into action, and Griffin had surgery immediately,
removing a large area of skin from his chest.
But by the time he returned to the vet to have his stitches out,
the cancer had already spread.
Further surgery wasn’t an option.
Griffin was given just weeks to live without treatment
and only three months to live with chemotherapy.
But chemotherapy uses toxic chemicals that would make touching
the dog or his waste poisonous to Adam’s baby girl.
She wouldn’t be able to play with the dog or go out in the yard.
Griffin’s treatment would be a danger to the family.
So Adam made the heartbreaking decision not to get Griffin the chemo.
So what's gone wrong in Griffin's body?
We know that cancer causes tumors in the body.
Smoking causes lung cancer,
sometimes breast and bowel cancer can run in families,
but what has gone wrong can seem a mystery.
Normally, our bodies exist in a harmonious state,
balancing cells that divide with those that are lost,
and this keeps the number of cells steady.
But with cancer, this balance is destroyed
and the cells divide uncontrollably.
They become a runaway car, dividing faster and faster.
This runaway out-of-control behavior
is caused by the DNA in the cells mutating.
So they ignore all the signals
that tell them to stop growing and dividing.
So cancer is actually a genetic disease because it’s caused by defective DNA.
In cancer, two major gene families fail:
Oncogenes drive the cells to divide and divide,
so they’re our car’s accelerator, flat to the floor.
But in the car, the brakes have failed too,
and those brakes are the tumor suppressor genes
who no longer act to slow and stop the division of the damaged cells.
The end result is a group of cells
growing in size, number and destructiveness,
a car speeding past stop signs towards an inevitable crash.
Cancer damages the body by invading into adjacent normal tissue
and spreading to vital organs like the liver and the lungs.
OK, so if we know what’s going wrong, why haven’t we cured cancer?
Because of this unstable DNA that cancers have,
any one tumor in a body
is going to consist of lots of different groups of mutated cells
that all share the same bad DNA called “clones.”
You can think of clones as being like different car brands -
some clones are VWs and others are Lamborghinis.
Because of this clones effect,
when we treat a cancer with a single type of treatment,
not all the cells might be killed.
There may be a clone that has a mutation
that makes it resistant to the chemotherapy
or better able to shrug off the damage from the radiation.
These clone effects are even more pronounced
when we look at a whole population of cancer sufferers,
like women with breast cancer.
Mutations differ from person to person,
and that means a treatment can work in one patient but not another.
Now, sometimes our cancer cells aren’t just an out-of-control regular car;
they become the Batmobile -
they’ve acquired superpowers to invade into normal tissues,
create their own blood supply, evade the immune system
and even suppress the body's defenses against the cancer.
To combat these different “Batmobile” superpowers,
we use multiple different treatments
all at the same time to try and kill a cancer,
the main ones being surgery, radiation and chemotherapy,
or as the oncologists call it, “slash, burn and poison.”
Boop!
But even with these combinations of treatments,
there might still be that one nasty cell,
the most pimped-out Batmobile
that can survive everything the doctors have to throw at it.
The cancer will seem to disappear, and the patient will go into remission.
But if even one nasty cell survives, the cancer can potentially reform itself,
and it’ll come back even nastier than before
because it’s already resistant
to everything the doctors had to throw at it.
For nearly a century now,
the main treatments we had were surgery, radiation and chemotherapy,
but recently a new strategy has emerged called immunotherapy.
As a veterinarian, I became interested in immunotherapy
after doing a Ph.D. in immunology and specialty training in pathology.
I developed new cancer treatments that are designed
using bacterial and plant products to wake up the body’s immune system,
so it recognizes the dangerous invader, that’s the cancer, and starts to fight it.
My goal is to gain an ally of the immune system,
like a police officer to chase down the out-of-control car,
and the bacterial and plant products we use
are our crime alert called “two triple zero.”
So OK, how do scientists usually develop cancer treatments?
Well, traditionally, cancer treatments are developed
in laboratory-based experiments using rats and mice.
So these rodents
have their tumors artificially created by being injected with tumor cells,
sometimes extracted from a human cancer,
that go into a healthy but often immunocompromised rodent.
Or sometimes mice are genetically engineered to have a gene defect,
so they develop cancers at an early age.
Many times scientists have cured these rats and mice,
but when you try that treatment in a human patient, it fails.
This is because the artificial cancers in these rodents -
they don’t interact with the body’s tissues, blood vessels
and immune systems like a human cancer.
Because of this, only 5%, or one in 20 treatments,
make it from the laboratory to treating cancer patients.
This is much worse than the success rate for heart disease,
which is one in five drugs.
And it’s even more shocking when you consider
that over a 100 billion dollars is spent globally
on cancer research every single year.
Scientists widely acknowledge that the problem
is these preclinical models being used are suboptimal.
Basically, they’re saying that the rats and the mice don’t work so well
because the tumors are too artificial.
The average rodent with cancer lives just weeks,
not the months and years a human patient battles their cancer.
So these rodent tumors -
they don’t reflect the complex genetics and resistance to treatment
we see in our human patients.
For developing immunotherapy, it's even worse,
as most laboratory animals have compromised immune systems,
so they’re not useful for developing the treatments.
Knowing these failings and the time and money
we waste trying to develop cancer therapies that don’t work,
scientists demand that preclinical models
must be more representative of the clinical situation,
even if it lengthens the time to develop treatments.
What they’re saying is they want a better mouse.
But I say these scientists are ignoring
something that’s sitting right beside us on the couch.
Because pet dogs naturally develop their cancer over a long period,
the way that that cancer interacts with the dog’s blood vessels,
immune system, tissues in the body - it’s really similar to human cancer.
In fact, the types of cancer that dogs get are similar to people too;
for almost every type of human cancer, there's a canine counterpart.
In fact, sometimes the cancer is even more common in dogs than people,
and it means there’s plenty of dogs out there for us to study.
Osteosarcoma, an aggressive cancer of bone that typically affects teenagers
is 27 times more common in dogs than people,
really common in large breed dogs like Great Danes and Rottweilers.
Dogs also get brain cancer,
the leading cause of cancer death in young children,
so they can help us study the disease and future treatments.
This means dogs can serve as a model
to help us understand cancer and try to cure it.
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
this doesn’t mean we have to experiment on our dogs like rats in the lab.
The fact that the dogs are home with us sitting on the couch,
and they’re watching Netflix and they’re eating kitchen scraps -
it actually strengthens their claim
to being our greatest ally to fight cancer.
Dog cancer trials are typically conducted in a way
that allows the dog to participate as an outpatient.
They go to the vet,
they have the future medicine, the experimental medicine,
they’re monitored to see that it’s safe and it works,
and then they head home with their owners.
This means that dog cancer trials are cost-effective too.
The dogs just pop into the vet clinic, and then they go home.
So there’s no need for expensive traditional laboratories.
I’d like to introduce two key concepts to you now:
The study of cancer in one species to help another
in our case, dogs and people, is called “comparative oncology,”
and progressing research from the laboratory
through to a useful treatment or test for patients
is called “translational medicine.”
Dog cancers have the same appearance, behavior and genetics as human cancer.
Dogs age faster than us.
Cancer is common and it runs in certain breeds,
and this means we can easily identify
candidate dogs to recruit to clinical trials.
This means we can learn a lot very efficiently and effectively
from studying cancer in pet dogs.
Now, I mentioned before that my team and I develop immunotherapies
and only a natural immune system like a pet dog is likely to interact
with the cancer in a way that’s beneficial for our research.
In fact, my team and I have cured dogs
which had what were considered incurable cancers
on our clinical trials.
So the dogs that enrolled in our clinical trials -
they either couldn’t have surgery because of the tumor’s location,
their chemotherapy had failed,
many times, their owners couldn’t afford the treatment
or considered treatments like chemotherapy dangerous to their kids.
In our modern day and age,
we must be conscious of how ethically we humans interact with other animals.
By using pet dogs, we’re not creating an artificial tumor
in a laboratory animal;
we’re merely trying to help an animal that’s naturally ill.
Cancer treatment is really expensive.
It’s typically in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for a single dog,
so many owners don’t have any option but to put down their pet.
By using pet dogs, we’ve created a more ethical,
a more scientifically robust
and a faster pathway to develop future medicines
for both dogs and people simultaneously.
Now, many dogs and their owners have benefited
from enrolling in our clinical trials.
One treatment we developed showed reductions in tumor size
with remissions in 30 to 40 percent of patients,
and another treatment benefited 30 percent of dogs.
In this trial, Jackson, a “rotti” -
he was only given 8 to 12 weeks to live off to his chemo failed,
but the immunotherapy allowed him to make it to 12 months.
Henry, the pointer, he was similarly given 8 to 12 weeks to live,
but with immunotherapy, his cancers disappeared,
and he had another 17 months with his family
before succumbing to old age.
To prove that dogs make great translational models,
doctors have already tried two about-pet-dog-tested immunotherapies
in human cancer patients who had no options left to treat their cancers,
and they showed beneficial results,
like reductions in mass size and fluids produced by the tumor.
These dogs gave us the confidence to say that those treatments would be safe,
and they would likely benefit those patients.
Now,
what happened to Griffin?
With just weeks to live, Griffin enrolled in one of our comparative oncology trials,
a personalized vaccine was made out of his cancer cells
and given back to him with needles like a puppy gets their vaccination.
Within four weeks, all his tumor cells had disappeared,
and he’s alive and well to this day, more than three years later.
That little baby girl - she isn’t a baby anymore,
and she’s had the opportunity to grow up with her best mate.
We need to stop ignoring this opportunity that's sitting beside us on the sofa.
Dogs are our best friends,
and they’re our perfect companions for curing cancer.
Thank you.
(Applause)