Our study in Nature's Scientific Reports was the 17th most downloaded cancer paper in 2023!
The study, "Shared hotspot mutations in oncogenes position dogs as an unparalleled comparative model for precision therapeutics" examined real-world clinical genomic data from 671 pet dogs with cancer treated by 200 veterinarians across the United States using the FidoCure platform.
At the time this study was published, it was the largest-ever genomic sampling study of canine cancers and increased the total number of canine tumors that had ever been sequenced by 33%. (Since the conclusion of this study, One Health and its nation-wide network of veterinarians have sequenced several thousand more canine cancer tumors.)
The tumor samples were then compared against a database representing nearly 25,000 human tumor samples to identify overlapping mutations in analogous human and canine cancers.
FidoCure and its research partners found 18 mutation “hotspots”—that is, genetic mutations that are likely a primary driver of the cancer—in canine patients and revealed that 8 of those hotspots overlap with hotspots found in human cancers.
Importantly, many of the cross-species mutational hotspots identified in the study are genetic mutations that are druggable with currently available treatments.
Over the past few decades, research in comparative oncology has revealed the incredible similarities between canine and human cancers. But we couldn’t fully appreciate the depth of this similarity without far more genomic data from canine cancer patients.
At the time this study was conducted, only 2,000 canine tumors had been genetically sequenced. That’s an order of magnitude less than the approximately 20,000 human tumors that have been genetically sequenced.
As human oncology has moved toward a research and treatment paradigm defined by genomics, it became increasingly uncertain whether dog cancer patients were as good of a model for human cancers as was once believed. The large-scale genomic data on canine cancers simply didn’t exist.
FidoCure is rapidly changing that by bringing canine genomic testing out of the lab to the point of care, which improves outcomes for pet dogs and deepens our understanding of both canine and human cancers.
Read the paper here.
