Jellybean continues to defy expectations. The 5-year-old Labrador retriever mix jumps from her favorite spot on the couch and walks around the living room with such ease, it’s like she’s never had metastatic cancer. Its owners, Patricia and Zach Mendonça, still can’t believe in the miracle. “She has a little more traction on her steps,” says Patricia.
Jellybean was diagnosed with bone cancer in her hind leg almost three years ago. Despite the amputation and chemotherapy, the cancer cells quickly spread through his blood to his lungs, as they do in 90% of cases in dogs. The survival time at this stage is on average two months. “We had no hope of curing her,” says Patricia. “We were pretty devastated.”
So in November 2020, the Mendoncas enrolled Jellybean in a clinical trial at Tufts University, about an hour’s drive from their home in Rhode Island in the United States. Jellybean received a trio of pills, free of charge, which the Mendoncas stuffed into her favorite chicken treats daily. By Christmas Jellybean’s tumors had started to shrink and they haven’t come back since. The response surprised even veterinarians treating Jellybean and raised hopes that these drugs could help not only other dogs, but humans as well.
Jellybean’s bone cancer, osteosarcoma, also affects people, especially children and adolescents. Fortunately, this is relatively rare: some 26,000 new cases are diagnosed each year worldwide. The problem is that there haven’t been new treatments for more than 35 years, says veterinary oncologist Amy LeBlanc, and those that are available aren’t very effective. Patients with osteosarcoma have a survival rate of only about 30 percent if the cancer cells spread to other parts of the body.
Canine studies, like the Jellybean trial, could change all that. Cancers that occur in pet dogs are molecularly and microscopically similar to human cancers – in the case of osteosarcoma, the similarities are striking. When compared under a microscope, a sample of canine tissue and a sample of human tissue from a tumor are indistinguishable. But although fortunately rare in humans, osteosarcoma is at least 10 times more common in dogs, which means there are plenty of canine cancer patients out there to help with research and drug testing. “Families and dogs participating are an important piece of the puzzle to move this research forward,” says Cheryl London, a veterinary oncologist at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, who treats Jellybean.
It is important to note that dogs are not subject to the same federal regulations that limit treatment options for humans; veterinarians are much freer to use existing off-label drugs against diseases for which there are currently no good treatments. All in all, this allows for faster and cheaper clinical trials.
Such tests are part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative that US President Joe Biden relaunched last year and for which he asked Congress to provide a $2.8 billion in Budget 2024. “They are designed to fill a gap in knowledge that is not sufficiently filled by traditional studies in mice or by data that cannot yet be easily collected in humans,” says LeBlanc. , who directs the comparative oncology program at the US National Cancer Institute. The program oversees clinical trials in dogs with cancer, which are conducted by Tufts and 21 other veterinary universities in the United States and Canada.