Oncologists Are Brilliant People

The biggest obstacle to treating cancer is the fact that it’s made of the patient’s own cells. Medicines are generally geared toward killing foreign things, but a tumor is not a foreign thing. It’s a badly behaved part of the patient’s own body that has somehow convinced the rest of the body to look the other way. It is really challenging for conventional drugs to distinguish between good guys and bad guys in this scenario… but you know who’s exceptionally skilled at telling those two apart? The immune system. It just needs the right instructions. That’s the basis of cancer vaccines.

One of these that has some age on it is the canine melanoma vaccine. Unlike other vaccinations, this shot isn’t given for prevention but to turn a patient’s own immune system against existing melanoma cells. It recognizes a specific surface molecule that’s abundant in this disease and attacks only those cells carrying it. Limitation: it only works for one kind of cancer. A newer variation on that theme allows us to expand our range of treatable malignancies by taking a piece from our patient’s tumor and using it to create a brand-new vaccine against that precise tissue. This technology could be used on any kind of cancer, anywhere in the body. A biopsy piece from the original tumor is submitted to the lab, where the particles of that sample are attached to a molecule that really irritates the immune system. The resulting substance is then injected into the patient, whose immune system, thus provoked, hustles directly to the site of the original tumor to pummel and shrink it.

All this is not to say that the immune system has become our only means of fighting cancer. The most effective approach to battling any illness is to attack it from multiple directions simultaneously. The best cancer treatment regimen would thus be a combination of vaccine technology and conventional pharmaceuticals. Even the idea of “conventional pharmaceuticals”, however, is evolving before our very eyes. New drugs called small molecule inhibitors were developed to be super-specific for a single chemical reaction in the abnormal cell’s reproductive cycle. Because they are more precisely targeted than the older chemotherapies, they do minimal harm to normal cells, and this helps to lessen unwanted side effects. This new class of pharmaceuticals can often be given in the form of a pill, which makes it more accessible to patients than traditional IV infusions.

Analyzing individual patient specimens to tailor drug therapy is yet another recent development in veterinary oncology. It streamlines treatment decisions by generating a detailed list of medicines most likely to extinguish the disease. Tumor analysis allows your oncologist to use their arsenal of anti-cancer drugs much more efficiently, without wasting precious time on trial and error.

That’s a lot of dense information which may sound less exciting than it actually is, but I’m not exactly the right person to be explaining it. You will want to hear it from an oncologist, the person who has the most hands-on experience and up-to-date information on what it would cost, how long it would take, what your personal commitment would be, and—most importantly—what impact it could have on your beloved pet’s longevity and comfort.

Dr. M.S. Regan