Researchers develop new treatment to fight cancer in dogs

This article was published by the Taiwan Headlines on March 3, 2006. It reports that currently in Taiwan, there are about 1.4 million dogs being raised. It is estimated that about 10,000 dogs die each year from cancer, causing a huge amount of grief for the families and individuals who owned them. Now, a professor from the National Taiwan University's Department of Animal Medicine has discovered a new method to treat cancer in dogs.

Professor Chu Jui-min found that injecting genetic material into the cancerous tumors of dogs could help boosting the dog's immunity, which in turn helps in the killing of the cancerous cells. Chu's research has preliminarily showed that such method has a clear therapeutic value in treating transmissible venereal tumors in dogs.

According to Chu, the cancerous cells develop a mechanism that keeps them from becoming vulnerable to the immune systems of a dog. The cells have an invisible cape around them that prevents the immune system from recognizing them as cancerous. As a result, the cells are allowed to grow and become a tumor.

To counter this problem, Chu injected interleukin genes into the dog's tumor. He then submitted the tumor to 10 mild electronic pulses, which caused a portion of the cells in the tumor to absorb the genes. The electronic pulses also assist the dog's immune system in recognizing the invisible mechanism in the cancerous cells and destroying them.

Interleukins are pleiotropic cytokines that have an important role in regulating cellular immune responses. Because the cytokines in humans and in dogs are quite similar, Chu and researchers at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the Academia Sinica have tried injecting the cytokine of the twelfth gene of humans into dogs. Their experiment involved six dogs that had cytokine injected into their skin cancers and, on average, the tumors disappeared completely in about two months after the treatment. There had been no side effects - and no recurrence of the cancer.

According to clinical diagnosis of dogs with cancer, about 45 to 50 percent of them have breast cancer, following by skin cancer which account for about 15 to 20 percent. In principle, Chu's method of injecting cytokines should also work for dogs with breast cancer. But more experiments need to be carried out before any final conclusion can be reached in this regard.