- I've adopted a love for morning runs.
- I've adopted a love for getting interrupted.
- I've adopted a love for landscaping
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- What is comparative oncology?
- Comparative oncology involves clinical trials
that include companion species,
primarily dogs and cats.
- We are going to be taking a biopsy today.
This is the melanoma right here. There's a big boy.
- We happen to be a program located within the Center
for Cancer Research that focuses on trying
to understand pet dogs
and the cancers that they develop naturally
and how those relate to humans and how we can study them
and improve the lives of both species.
- Because if it wasn't for a vaccine,
he wouldn't be here today.
- What we're doing in the dog trials is exactly
analogous to what we could be doing in, in human trials
- Center.
Being diagnosed with cancer at 20 years old is
definitely difficult,
but there are scientists
and veterinarians out there that their full-time job is
looking at canine cancers, osteosarcoma,
trying to come up with a cure.
And I am one of the people that they are trying to cure.
- So today we are going to
the vet clinic for Milton to get his fifth treatment
for his research trial.
So he was diagnosed
with oral melanoma last March.
And so he has this mass, this tumor in his mouth
and the U of I Vet Clinic is doing a research trial
to try and get his immune system to sort
of fight that tumor away.
And so Milton's had four injections already
and today he's gonna get his fifth
Leona's really grown up with him.
She's four now, so all she's known is Milton. Right, Noni?
I love you, Milton
- Located near Washington,
DC in Bethesda, Maryland.
The National Institutes of Health is home to much
of the nation's top cancer research,
including the more recent contribution
of veterinary science in the study of comparative oncology.
Dr. Amy LeBlanc is a veterinary oncologist,
senior scientist
and director of the National Cancer Institute's Comparative
Oncology program
where she oversees the Comparative Oncology Trials
Consortium, which plans
and carries out new cancer therapy clinical trials in pet
dogs with cancer.
- We happen to be a program located within the intramural
Center for Cancer Research that focuses on trying
to understand pet dogs
and the cancers that they develop naturally in their
lifespan and how those relate to humans
and how we can study them to benefit outcomes
and improve the lives of both species.
- Comparative oncology is the study
of naturally occurring cancers in humans
and their pets, particularly dogs.
While differences in shared cancers do exist,
research has focused on the similarities between humans
and dogs, such as bladder cancer, leukemia, lymphoma,
osteosarcoma and melanoma.
- And this cryo media here,
is this the DMSO and fetal cough? Yes, correct. Yes.
- Dr. Nicola Mason is a veterinarian
and professor of medicine and pathobiology
at the University of Pennsylvania School
of Veterinary Medicine based in Philadelphia.
It is the coordinating center
for canine cancer immunotherapy trials as part
of the Cancer Moonshot program. - You know,
- We're often asked why dogs?
Why should you use dogs
in this sort of comparative way and how can they help us
advance these types of therapies?
And I think when we think about dogs,
we recognize not only do they have very similar genetics
to humans, but they also share our environment.
They're walking next to us, they share our food,
they often sleep with us.
And so oftentimes when we think about cancers,
there are genetic cues for cancers
and there's environmental cues as well.
- And so the fact that they
get cancer is fundamentally really important
for us to understand it.
They're getting cancer throughout the context
of their natural lifespan just like a human would.
They are not getting cancer
because somebody's giving it to them.
They're not experimental animals.
They aren't mice or rats or monkeys.
These are family members.
- Good morning everyone. How are you guys?
How are you this morning?
Good, good. How are you Milton?
Why don't we go back to an exam room
and we'll talk about how he's been
doing the last three weeks.
Perfect. Okay. We are at the University
of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital,
specifically in the cancer care clinic. - Be in this
one here to our left.
- Perfect. - And for about 10 years,
I helped out in chemotherapy ward
and then 10 years later down the road,
10 years ago from today, started working
with clinical trials specifically and Dr. Fan.
- I can't see.
Dr. Timothy Fan is a veterinarian
and the Associate Director for Translational Research
and Development at the University
of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Cancer Center.
- Good to see you. There was always the
appreciation for how pets with cancer
could be helpful to understand cancer people.
But I think that that has really changed
and transformed over, you know, the past 15 years.
There are more people that are doing comparative oncology
and I think that there is a much broader acceptance
of the value of how we can actually include pets
with cancer into
drug development pathway, especially
for immunotherapeutics.
- Come on Milton.
Let's head on in. 1, 2, 3.
All right.
- Immunotherapy is actually one
of the biggest changes since I've been here.
Most of the work, when I started working
with Dr Fan 10 years ago, we used more traditional type
of treatments, different combinations of chemotherapy
or chemotherapy with radiation therapy.
And building on this new frontier of immunotherapy,
either by itself or in combination with some
of those more traditional treatments
has really jump started what we've been able to do
and how well that we've been able to start fighting some
of these harder to treat cancers.
- So we're gathering some blood from Milton in order
to get an insight on how his immune system is responding
to our treatment.
As these animals are coming in, we're working
with a scientist behind the scenes to see
how their tumors are responding,
how their immune system is responding.
- Come on, Bud. Alright.
- Yeah, so what we went ahead
and did is we give an intravenous sedative,
and this is gonna let Milton get very calm
and then he'll go into a very light plane kind of sedation
and that will allow us to
position him in the CT machine.
And then we'll go ahead and then capture the images.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a comparison.
Our initial scan is on the right side,
and then today's scan is on the left side.
And what we're looking for is this, this mass here,
which is on the roof of his mouth.
And this is in a lesion that we initially injected
and it went very, very flat.
And today, what we can see over on this scan,
this is his mouth
and we can see that there is more of a bulge right here,
regrowth of that tumor right now.
And so our goal is to inject this tumor with the cytokine
to try to get a lot of inflammation going there
and hopefully his immune system will then recognize it
and begin to attack it.
- Dr Fan's work focuses on molecules called cytokines
that activate the immune system
and can stop tumor growth while in theory
that should make them a good option.
The problem with cytokines is that if you get large numbers
of them circulating in your body, it can be toxic,
sometimes deadly.
So Dr. Fan
and his team set out to find ways
of keeping these cytokines in the tumor itself.
- How can we do that? Some very,
very smart scientists have really devised ways
to retain these inflammatory cytokines within a specific
area that you inject.
So the goal here is to
inject this tumor.
And so you can see there's a little bit
that leaked out in the center right here.
- Dr. Fan is injecting Milton's tumor
with a cytokine called Interleukin 12
that has been modified to stay within the tumor,
keeping the cancer fighting medicine there
to prevent Milton from experiencing
any toxic side effects.
- Clearly we know that we have very,
very potent localized immune inflammation.
There's no question about that.
I think what we were really, really trying to go for
and what everyone wants to try to go for is, with
that little spark that you create in that little tumor,
can you actually have it catch fire across the body
to the little baby tumors that may be somewhere else?
And that's where everyone is trying
to bring these technologies
to locally deposit an immune stimulus
to fight the tumor locally,
but enough of that spark that feeds
and actually grows distantly
to affect other tumors that may be in the body.
This is a perfect storm in many ways of
having great science
and understanding how to manipulate the immune system
to help treat pet dogs with really deadly cancers
with immunotherapies.
It, it is a really gratifying full circle
of discovery,
translation, development, impact.
How are you guys doing? Good, how are you? I'm fine.
So Milton had a good visit today.
- Good. Okay.
And so I think that injection went well
and he was a very good patient.
- Boop. He gets a boop and so Milton's doing a good job.
- We are gonna do our best job to try to help Milton out.
It really makes a difference each day
extra that we get to spend with him.
So really appreciative. Thank you. Thank you. Let's run!
Oh, come on Milton. Let's go home.
So being part of clinical trials has been a great way
to give owners options outside of the normal handbag
of tools that oncologists would have, gives them hope.
Where most of the time when we hear cancer we
don't, we don't get that hope.
And so they're usually very thankful for,
for that opportunity.
- Come on, ready? I'm Amanda Ostrander,
this is my husband Brian Ostrander
and this is our special dog, Desi.
- For the last 13 years, part of the family.
- He's just been a joy and he has been on quite
a journey with cancer.
- We get the opportunity for Desi to come back
after we haven't seen him in six months with both Amanda
and Brian, but also their two daughters.
And I'm absolutely thrilled to see all
of them, especially Mr. Desi,
to be able to give him a big hug. - It was March, 2021
when he was first diagnosed.
- Usually oral melanoma,
if it's not surgical, we usually treat with radiation.
And to the disappointment
of the radiation oncology resident, that tumor continued
to grow larger and larger and larger.
- His owners had already tried other things, surgery,
radiation therapy, and nothing was working.
- We knew he didn't have long 'cause he wasn't responding.
- The Ostranders were very,
very devastated by this, right?
You know, to to say our loved family member is gonna lose
their battle to cancer
that is really emotionally rocking for any family.
- So then they said, would you wanna be part
of a clinical trial?
And I was like, tell me more.
- There's no promises, no guarantees.
But they really wanted to do everything
that they felt they could and not give up on Desi.
- We made the decision, the best decision we've ever made,
to be part of the trial.
- We did a CT scan at Day Zero to see what happened
before we did anything.
We did a CT scan at day 28, so after two doses and right
before the third dose.
- I'm checking it every day,
but I'm certainly not a doctor.
And I'm like, I think it looks smaller.
So we come in and it's shrinking.
The next, you know, we bring him in for treatment,
it's shrinking again and, again,
at the end of the trial phase,
he shrunk down to absolutely nothing.
There was no evidence of disease.
- By Day 84, it was really remarkable.
Like 95% of that tumor was already gone.
And so that has continued.
And I know that for Desi, the time that we've started Desi
until today has been 1034 days.
- We, we felt like we would regret not trying.
So we made the decision to, and thank God we did
because you guys have given us the
gift of watching him grow old.
- You know, I think that these are moments that we all look
for as a clinician, as a researcher,
we wanna bring new technologies, new science to actually
pioneer and actually fight cancer, cure cancer.
And I think that in Desi's case, we, we achieved that,
we were able to cure his cancer
and it's, it is wonderful to see him
to be an old dog now, right?
- The gift of growing old. That is a gift.
- To be involved in these type of discoveries.
I feel fulfilled that I'm doing something
that has a chance to be impactful
- In the oncology world.
Unfortunately we don't get a ton of successes,
but to just get one win in the win column absolutely keeps
me motivated to keep working the long days
and to keep fighting for all
of those four-legged animals out there.
Oh, absolutely. I'll give him a million kisses.
I love you. I'm proud of you. Yes, yes I am.
- While only around 30% of cancer patients respond
to immunotherapy, it remains one
of the most promising avenues for treating cancer.
And one of the initiatives of the
National Cancer Institute's Cancer Moonshot program
to encourage and accelerate cancer research across
the United States.
- Today President Biden is making a push
for his Cancer Moonshot Initiative,
which he hopes will end the disease as we know it.
The goal is to cut cancer death rates by at least 50%,
at least 50% in the next 25 years.
To turn more cancers from death sentences into chronic
diseases people can live with.
- Since its establishment.
In 2016, the Cancer Moonshot Initiative has
provided nearly $2 billion in funding, supported over 70
programs and more than 250 cancer research projects,
including innovation in the field of comparative oncology,
which today continues to grow
as more researchers across the country are working
to find treatments for a range of cancers.
From the sprawling campus of the National Institutes
of Health, the potential
of comparative oncology flourishes in both veterinary
and human research labs.
One of the pioneers of human vaccines is Dr. John Schiller.
In the 1990s, he and his colleague
Dr. Doug Lowey, developed the technology that led
to the HPV vaccine, which trains the immune system
to fight off human papilloma viruses that cause cervical
and other cancers.
Now Dr. Schiller
is helping lead a new clinical trial, repurposing
the HPV vaccine
and two other low cost vaccines that prevent shingles
and rabies, to treat solid tumor cancers in dogs.
The hope is that one day this cancer treatment will be
available to people as well.
- Current cancer therapies are overwhelmingly moving
to be personalized, complex and therefore expensive.
We are trying to develop, with these technologies,
cancer therapies that can work in low resource settings.
It's really neat that we can enroll any kind of dog.
Okay, so this is sort of the power
that we think about this again
for low resource settings is you got a tumor,
we can treat it okay, as long as we can inject it.
And so, you know, in the trials we don't have
to just have this one particular tumor type
that has this one mutation and things like that.
It's just, got a dog's got a tumor, let's treat it.
- Well I think we're poised to learn a lot in the
next 18 months.
So the enrollment as it continues
and as we get, you know, samples
and tissues back from these dogs that we're recruiting
and treating and observing
and caring for, you know,
the next few months are gonna be really
exciting to see what we learn
- At the University of Wisconsin School
of Veterinary Medicine.
This concept is currently in the early stages
of clinical testing.
Dr. David Vail heads the team
of researchers moving this trial forward
- With this technology.
We have a known target that's already commercially available
and so we don't have to use the lab
to create this process at all.
We just start going right away into the vaccination process.
- I'm Ruth Odegaard, this is my dog, Duke.
There are some people that'll come up to me
and think that he has a ball in his mouth.
And I'm like, no, it's not a ball.
He's, he's fighting cancer.
So my daughter-in-law actually made this really cool banner
for him that says, Hi, my name is Duke, I'm a cancer fighter.
- Today we're planning on doing
essentially the same thing
that we've been doing every week.
So still giving him the treatment today,
today's a little bit special though.
We are going to be taking a biopsy today
and also getting like some full blood work,
which we haven't necessarily been
doing at every appointment.
- So Duke has a soft tissue sarcoma in his
oral cavity there.
There's no bony component here.
The teeth are just kind of floating in tumor,
which has pushed his bulb of his nose up
and deformed his face.
There's a form of soft tissue sarcoma that is often referred
to as a high low soft tissue sarcoma.
The oral cavity that is under the microscope,
it looks relatively benign and non-aggressive,
but in the clinical patient it is very aggressive
and starts to eat away at bone
and tissue in his oral cavity.
Right now, at the extent of it,
while it's visually very profound,
soft tissue sarcomas in general
do not systemically affect
the patient to a great degree.
That is that they still feel good,
they have a great appetite, they're not nauseated.
He runs around, does all the things
that he would normally do during the day.
So he's really a good candidate for treatment.
- When I first came here, they did a, they did a biopsy to,
to verify that it was cancer
and then they did x-rays, they did a lot of blood work,
they did a CT scan and then they gave me four options.
One of 'em was the option of taking his whole top jaw off
and it would take away all the tumor.
And my second option was radiation and chemo.
And my third option was just taking him home,
just letting him live out as healthy as a life as he could.
And then my fourth option was a clinical trial. Okay?
So it wasn't an easy decision for me, but
because the clinical trial he has,
they're using his own immune system to fight
to kill this tumor.
And because he has such a strong immune system
and he is very healthy, I opted to go that route first
- Blow back, okay, next quadrant.
And so the idea is
that we've already primed the immune system
to seek out those, those bad guys.
And now we've put the bad guys within the tumor
and the immune system will attack the tumor.
- Because this is my second trip here,
I don't know the outcome yet,
but in my eyes, if this could help another dog down the road
or future one of my dogs down the road,
that's why I decided to go with the clinical trial.
Okay, you ready? Let's go. Let's go.
Cancer's a hard thing, I think
to say like you never wanna say you're completely free
and clear because I think there's always
that worry in the back of your head.
But I think how we look at it now is that
today he's healthy.
Today he's good and we're just gonna keep monitoring him
and I, this is how I always looked at it.
And this was how, this is how it started.
We met Batman at an adoption event
and he was only a couple months old at that time,
it was March 4th, 2018.
We officially adopted him.
And then September 4th, 2018 is when he got diagnosed
with osteosarcoma.
I don't think we realized how prevalent cancer was in dogs
and then it was something like 50%
of dogs will end up with cancer.
- So the rough estimates are somewhere between about 10
to 15,000 dogs per year in the US
will be diagnosed with osteosarcoma.
- You know, once we found out about the study at Penn Vet,
it was, how soon can we get him in there?
What's the, I mean, what's the quickest we could do it?
So we had a couple connections to Dr. Mason
and they emailed her.
We were able to get into the study.
- Batman was diagnosed when he was very young.
I think he was just over a year of age,
whereas dogs are usually middle to older age.
But we do see a small population of dogs
developing osteosarcoma when they're very young.
And Batman was one of them.
And unfortunately, frequently it's very aggressive.
- Osteosarcoma is an aggressive form
of bone cancer. In humans
it's rare though usually affecting children
and young adults. In dogs,
however, it's far more common.
- They did the amputation
and then they started chemo pretty much right away on him.
And he had four rounds of chemo.
And then after the chemo was finished,
he could do the vaccine,
which they did three rounds of that on him.
- Nothing is, is too much for Batman and,
and he really just didn't miss a beat.
He went through this therapy, including his amputation,
as if nothing had happened. Oh, the legs missing.
Okay, must have left that somewhere. Move on.
And I think his owners are very similar actually.
They, they sort of took Batman through this,
this journey.
- There you are, - Good job,
Buddy.
It became this thing of let me get him to a year.
And then once we got him to one, I was like,
let me get him to three.
And then once we got him with three, it became,
let me get him to six.
And so it was always having these milestones for him
of let us just get to the next birthday.
- The way that these owners get involved in these studies
is remarkable.
They're there every day
monitoring them, watching them.
They report if something is wrong
and they are integral in us being able to do this work.
Is that your puppy dog? Yeah.
- Batman was diagnosed, gosh six years ago
and the prognosis the day of diagnosis was a year at best.
That's what you can hope for.
And here we are six years later
and he's happy, he's healthy, he's a normal dog.
If it wasn't for Dr. Mason
and the work that she's doing with the vaccine,
he wouldn't be here today.
It's really like a miracle. The work that she's doing.
- Dr. Mason and her colleagues
launched the first clinical trial
to treat canine osteosarcoma using a vaccine made
of something that may sound surprising. Listeria.
- What is listeria? Listeria is a bacteria.
And you may have heard about it
because it is the cause of food poisoning
in some instances,
in, for example, processed meats and cheeses.
And it causes some very unpleasant
clinical signs when you have listeria food poisoning.
One of the reasons that it causes those sort
of unpleasant clinical signs is
because it is a really potent stimulator
of your immune system.
- Dr. Mason and her colleagues took advantage of this,
creating a vaccine with a modified version of listeria
that doesn't cause any dangerous symptoms.
In this way, the modified listeria
teaches the immune system
to kill off any osteosarcoma cells throughout the body.
- So the first trial that we did
with the listeria vaccine was solely at Penn.
We had dogs that came from all over the country,
but the vaccine was administered here,
the follow-ups were done here. Since Sasha was the first
of 18 dogs,
and the idea was
that these patients would have amputation,
they would have chemotherapy, so they have standard of care,
but then they have the option if they so choose
to receive this experimental vaccine.
Three doses at three week intervals.
- The first trial with 18 dogs lasted for three years,
which included follow-up appointments.
- The results of the first trial were really
very impressive.
So with those 18 dogs we were able
to see a distinct increase in
disease-free interval,
meaning that the time between amputation
and when the disease comes back,
that time was significantly prolonged.
And also an increase in overall survival.
- The trials also gained the attention of Dr. Amy LeBlanc
and her colleagues at the National Institutes of Health.
In preparation of their own osteosarcoma clinical trial.
- We reviewed a lot of different therapeutic concepts
and one of them was Dr.
Mason's listeria HER2 trial. That was chosen as the,
the trial concept that had the most promise in terms
of being translationally relevant for humans
and really able to fit within the construct
of canine osteosarcoma care.
It is comparative oncology in action.
- And that involved 11 different academic sites
around the country with exactly the same vaccine
that we had trialed here at the single site initial study
at Penn. - And we
enrolled 118 dogs on
that trial, over about a two year period.
We definitely saw dogs
that lived a really long time on that trial.
Those are obviously dogs that have the power to respond
to an immunotherapeutic approach.
But there were also certainly dogs that didn't.
And so what we're learning from continuing
to look at the data from that trial is
that there are bio markers of response
that you can correlate to a good outcome vs a bad outcome
This is important because it has links to the way
that immunotherapy is being developed for humans.
- Come on. - My name is Matt Olson.
I'm from Hillsborough, New Jersey. Next
to me here is my adopted rescue dog
Sandy. She's a daddy's girl.
She has to be by my side all the time.
- She was diagnosed about a year or so
after he adopted her.
- Sandy was five
and a half years old when she was first diagnosed
with osteosarcoma.
- That was most likely to cause her
to die within the year.
- So my regular vet, he knew of Dr. Mason
and the study of the listeria vaccine
that they were doing down here at
University of Pennsylvania.
And within two weeks we were down here having her
treatment beginning.
- Sandy was able to be enrolled
on that clinical trial,
underwent a full limb amputation, also went
through chemotherapy without any side effects
and took the vaccine as well in her stride.
- She did show signs of response
to the listeria vaccine,
which was a temperature rise indicating
that the body was reacting and fighting back.
- These are Sandy's records.
We have radiographs from her last visit on the clinical
trial now three years from her initial
diagnosis.
And again, we see no evidence of metastatic disease.
And of course that's really very encouraging.
- Trial was completed in 2021.
So for three years I was bringing her down here
every two months.
- Sandy, a 9-year-old golden retriever,
joined a nationwide trial in 2018.
We met her this past August with her owner Matt Olson.
- So yes, Matt, Sandy and I ended up on, on 60 Minutes
- During the trial, Dr. Mason told us Sandy's immune system
reacted to the listeria just as she'd hoped.
- Her body temperature started to increase, peaked
around about four hours
and then started to drop down again.
We sort of want to see that
because it tells us
that the immunotherapy is in fact stimulating her immune
response, which is what we want to happen.
- There's no sign of cancer. - No.
- And you've had four great years with her. Yeah.
Did she get like extra treats when she got through it all?
- She got everything. She still does man.
- I bet she does. The 60 Minutes segment on
comparative oncology really helped the public awareness of
what was possible in terms of studying dogs
and offering dogs therapies
that were really designed to help humans.
But were also able to help dogs themselves
with the cancers that they develop.
- Sandy is 11 years old now. She's doing fantastic.
She's getting a little older.
Walking a little slower, but she is in great shape.
- Hey, how are you? Hi. So good to see you.
Oh my gosh, how are you? I'm well, how are you doing? Good.
How are you doing?
- How's she doing?
She's doing great. We just had x-rays six months ago.
- Yes - They were clear. So six years now.
- It's all one big team effort
and it's wonderful to see this result,
it really is. You know, she's teaching us a lot.
We were looking at various things in her blood
to see if we could understand,
why she had done so well.
So we continue to learn from her, don't we?
- So I understand that this study that was related
to the dogs here is now being transferred to young children.
- Yes, yes, that's correct. That's absolutely correct.
And we know that the dogs
who have this disease have a very similar type
of disease as the children do as well.
So you know, the concept
of a comparative approach is that if we can find therapies
that benefit the dogs with this disease,
then we are very hopeful that this type
of approach could actually benefit people as well.
And we know that those cancers are really very similar
between the dogs and the humans.
This is basically on a cellular level,
the osteosarcoma lesions, a human case of osteosarcoma
and a a dog case of osteosarcoma side by side.
And I think what you can see is both
of these look really very, very similar.
So what we are seeing here in sort
of the dark purple are the osteoblast, the nuclei
of those cells that are actually the cancer cells.
So clinically they present in the same way. They act in
the same way.
You know, this again emphasizes the idea that
the dogs that develop these naturally occurring tumors,
really many of them will look very similar
to tumors in humans.
- And I think that therein lies an opportunity, right?
To study a common canine tumor for the benefit
of a rare human tumor. To benefit,
really, everybody.
- While research drives innovation in medicine,
dealing with cancer ultimately brings the disease
home and to the heart.
Just outside of Philadelphia, the Agosti family adjusts
to the loss of their son
and brother, Massi. At just 16
years old, he had recently lost a two year battle
with osteosarcoma.
- Massi was a very kind, very compassionate kid.
Always active and engaged with life and people
and asking questions,
and loved to travel and play sports
and be with family.
And none of that changed.
And I think even as much as osteosarcoma took away,
including his leg, ultimately his life, he somehow managed
to just keep doing things
until he just couldn't anymore.
A pediatric oncologist somewhere said
that when a child has cancer, a family has cancer.
And that is so true.
- The loss is recent, but it's been a long journey.
Two plus years of his fight against osteosarcoma.
It's such a rare disease.
4 to 500 kids in the US get osteosarcoma.
- It's very aggressive, it grows quickly, it can spread
to other parts of the body.
And so it's a really tough cancer. It's a scary cancer.
Massi started to have knee pain
in February, March of 2022.
- He was running track, he was playing soccer
and you know, he's 14, he just hit his growth spurt,
so we're thinking, you know, growing pains,
maybe tendonitis.
- We didn't realize that it was actually bone cancer
until the end of April.
Massi felt that to really maximize his chances
of surviving this cancer, to really try
and make sure it doesn't come back, either in the
leg or the lung,
he was going to amputate.
It is a long healing process.
Just as soon as he could, started to get fitted
for a prosthetic.
But he wasn't really able to do it intensively
and sort of master the art of walking
with a a prosthetic limb until he was done
with his chemotherapy.
It didn't stop him. It really was exactly what he wanted,
which was to be able to resume living this life in motion.
- Once he relapsed,
after three months of of being in remission,
we were in the clinical wilderness.
- You could do chemotherapy again,
but we knew that it was unlikely to work.
And so we were suddenly cast into this jungle
of clinical trials with no path.
You don't know which one to choose. Is it going to work?
Is it going to be safe? Where is it located? Will I qualify?
And here was this story on 60 Minutes.
- The 60 Minutes story, I think came to our attention
'cause someone, a friend of ours, said
you gotta see this story.
Have there been a lot of new
treatments for osteosarcoma?
- Unfortunately, no.
We've been using the same chemotherapy
for about the last 60 years or so.
- Really? Is that because it's a rare form of cancer?
- Yeah, it's harder to study.
'cause there's smaller numbers of patients to, you know,
study in large trials.
And also since it's rare, not a lot of funding of goes
to a lot of trials for it.
- But there were trials in pet dogs of an
experimental immunotherapy treatment for osteosarcoma
that began in 2012 led by Dr.
Nicola Mason using the bacteria listeria.
- That story on 60 Minutes, where they interviewed Dr.
Nicola Mason at Penn Vet really resonated with me
because I'm a vaccine specialist. I mentioned
that I'm a pediatrician and a scientist
and my science is vaccines.
And so to hear about a cancer vaccine
for a rare pediatric cancer like osteosarcoma just brought
together all of these worlds
that were really important to me.
- In 2021,
the FDA approved a phase two clinical trial using modified
listeria to treat young adults
and children like Kristy Gomes,
with recurrent osteosarcoma
that spread to their lungs.
- I was very moved by the fact that
people were trying to help kids
and dogs with osteosarcoma,
and that in fact it started with dogs.
It didn't even start in pediatrics.
It started in veterinarian medicine.
And then someone had the vision
to think, oh my goodness,
there are these 500 kids every year in the United States
who get osteosarcoma.
Maybe this can help them too.
And here was this story on 60 Minutes
that was already showing you
that there was some promise. It wasn't guaranteed to work
for everyone who took this vaccine,
but there were some examples that really gave hope.
- Kristy's last scan showed no signs of cancer.
She continues to get immunotherapy
every three weeks.
- Benjamin come here Between treatments
and homework, you'll find her with her Yorkie, Benny,
a gift from her mom. One more dog
that's helping her in her recovery.
- I didn't know Dr. Mason beforehand, but
after the 60 Minutes interview, I definitely wanted
to know her better and the work that she was doing,
and I reached out to her after Massi's cancer returned,
and we knew that our options were very limited.
And furthermore, she was right there in our backyard.
She's in downtown Philadelphia at the Penn Vet School.
And so I reached out to her and
to be honest, I wasn't totally expecting to hear back,
but I heard back right away.
- I remember that we sort
of started straight away talking about the vaccine
and it was clear that
Yaz had medical knowledge.
She wanted to know how the dogs had responded
to the vaccine, sort of the side effects
that the dogs had got, how the dogs were doing,
- How was it designed, what was it meant to do,
what had she observed in the dogs
who had received the vaccine.
- And sort of halfway through that conversation, I sort
of stopped her and I sort of said, you know,
I'm assuming that you're asking these questions
because your dog has osteosarcoma.
And she said, no, my son has osteosarcoma.
And I just remember being sort of hit like a ton of bricks.
There was sort of a, a sudden realization
of this is quite different.
I speak to a lot of people who have dogs with osteosarcoma.
And here I was talking to a lady whose son
was battling osteosarcoma.
And I do remember that had quite a profound effect on me,
during that call and afterwards as well.
- Welcome to osteosarcoma.
It brings a lot of different worlds together.
There's a lot of strange coincidences, which, you know,
we've come to realize are not coincidences.
So the fact
that someone was working on an osteosarcoma treatment
in our own backyard here in Philadelphia
that showed promise,
something we hadn't seen in our experience
with osteosarcoma, was just amazing.
- So he had multiple tumors that had appeared
or reappeared in both of his lungs.
And as we looked into clinical trials
and learned more about the listeria HER2 vaccine trial,
that Dr. Nicola Mason
had done in dogs, we learned that in order
to qualify, in order to get into the trial, you had
to have clear lungs.
All of those tumors needed to be removed.
And after his first surgery,
we thought everything was going well.
He was recovering easily and feeling good.
And unfortunately, the night
before he was scheduled for the second lung surgery,
he got sick
and we ended up having to take him to the emergency room.
And while he was there, he had an x-ray of his lungs
and it showed that the tumors had actually returned
to the side that we had just operated on.
And so it became very apparent that he would not qualify
to participate in this clinical trial.
It was literally gone overnight.
We really didn't know what to do.
It was devastating.
Chemotherapy was already off the table.
Massi had made it clear he was not doing that again.
And there were a couple of pill based treatments
that had already been tested
and they were not cures, they were really just treatments
that were meant to buy you time.
He felt, and we supported him a hundred percent,
that this was probably the best thing to do, was
to just go home, take these pills,
and just see how much time it could buy you.
- We created a public Facebook group
to document his journey.
We called it the Massi Strong Group.
And he really inspired a lot of people, certainly,
you know, beyond the family
- For most
of his relapse period from March, 2023,
right through Christmas 2023,
There were ups and downs, and of course he had bad days,
but, but mostly he was really able to live life as much
as he possibly could.
After Christmas, you could sense that there was a change.
I think as, as Massi was dying, it became more
and more important to us as a family to find a way
to make sure that
his life and his death did not go to waste.
- What followed from that for us naturally was that
what is the way to continue
that fight even after Massi's death.
And that natural, the answer to
that really was donating the tissues to science to allow
that critical research to continue
- Because the answers are in there
and it's really hard for researchers to get samples
of tumors from children.
As I understood, reading a lot of publications,
especially ones by Dr. Amy Leblanc, she had heard about
- Us through Dr. Mason
because they have a connection at CHOP in Philadelphia.
And she knew that we were trying very hard to establish
that molecular genomic framework of osteosarcoma
between dogs and humans.
- And I felt comfortable reaching out
and just asking her, what can we do?
How can we help? Would it be helpful
to you if we donated Massi's tumors to your research?
- These came to us from a family,
a mom who contacted us
about collecting these samples
from her son when he passes away
and having them be a part of our work, which is just
an amazing act of courage
and strength to take that moment of suffering
and turn it into something that could really help
other patients that suffer from this disease.
So they're incredibly important to us
and have come to us at a time that
it's just really transformational for this project
- Now.
It's an amazing feeling knowing
that Massi's tumor samples are contributing to research.
Because, you know, when you think about the fact
that those very tumors that killed
Massi in the end are potentially now going
to save lives for hundreds, if not thousands
of kids in the future, there's really no better way to
honor Massi's legacy than to have done that.
- I'm Olga Nikitin. I live in Portland, Oregon.
When I was 37, I was diagnosed with
stage three breast breast cancer.
After that, it was found in my
chest wall and then traveled to my spine
and eventually to my liver.
And about a year ago,
about 17 years since the first diagnosis,
they found tumors in my other breast.
Music plays a huge role in my life ever since I was
a young child.
If I'm sad or stressed, music can cheer me up.
- That was Beautiful.
I grew up in Odesa, Ukraine
and I've been in the country for,
since 1993.
Our family came as Jewish refugees.
We've been here in Portland only four and a half years.
We came from California, the Bay Area.
- How was the singing lesson?
- Singing lesson was good.
Yeah, I'm just, I'm just not happy to go
to treatment tomorrow.
- I'm sorry, - Another day. That's okay.
- Not the first time. - Not the last time.
My husband is an engineer.
My son graduated from Yale last year
and just started medical school
recently in New York.
- Hi mom. - Hi Booboo. How are you?
- I'm good. I'm tired.
It's been a long day. How are you doing?
- I'm good, I'm good.
Getting ready for my procedure tomorrow.
- So what, what treatment is this for you?
- It's, it's going to be number six, so have,
yeah, so including tomorrow I'll have three more
and then I don't know what happens afterwards,
so let's just hope I'm cured magically.
When I heard about this experimental study
that it's immune therapy
and when the drug is injected directly into the tumor,
for some reason I thought that's what I need
because it's stage A testing.
It's at some point they only had I think eight people
who were, you know, using this drug.
You know, actually was just told recently that,
the same clinical trial that I'm having was done on dogs
before first.
So can you imagine,
- So it was originally done, - So that was
originally done on dogs?
Yes. And dogs with mouth melanoma.
And it actually, the drug was very helpful.
And dogs, some dogs went,
many dogs probably went into remission.
So I'm hoping,
and I kind of consider that to be a sign, good sign
for me, right?
Because you know how much I like doggies.
- How much you love dogs, Yeah,
- I love dogs.
- So, the treatment was
entirely developed originally for dogs to begin with?
- Yeah, I think it was targeted just like,
just like this one for me. So, which, so super
- Cool. Yeah.
- And worked - For the dogs.
- It worked for the dogs, which makes me very happy.
And I would like to see some photographs of dogs
who survived that cancer.
when my doctors told me about the clinical trial
I was so excited about it, even though it's,
it's just a very, very early stage of testing,
ready, set, go.
But when I found out that
there are dogs who went through
this particular type of therapy first,
and they also participated in such an advanced clinical
trial, I love you too.
Okay. Sorry baby. There you go.
As a result, I was able to be treated with the same drug.
It's a good sign for me because I love dogs so much
and I always felt connection to them.
Do you love me? Oh, you love me.
So now I believe
that this treatment will be successful even more.
In this clinical trial.
I have been approved for eight treatments.
There are three weeks between treatments
and the trial is going to be completed for me after eight,
after eight treatments.
And right now is actually treatment number six.
I could have gone on oral chemo, which
for some reason just scared me a lot.
And so I was, you know, speaking to my doctors,
my family, my son.
And we went to look for other treatments,
possibly experimental treatment.
- Olga has had surgery for breast cancer.
She's had breast cancer come back in her spine
in her liver, in her lymph nodes,
and now even in her chest wall.
- Good Morning, Olga. How are you doing?
- Good, how are you?
Olga's done Traditional treatment.
She's done a lot of focus treatment.
She's done endocrine therapies,
She's done targeted therapies. Now, doing immunotherapy,
my hope for her is this can give her some great disease
control, keep her cancer under control
and that she can delay
or put off doing more cytotoxic chemotherapy
for a while.
Good morning. I've known Olga for several years,
but not her entire cancer journey.
When I met her, she already had advanced cancer
and was looking for other treatments.
We were able to find treatments for her
that were standard of care that were approved.
But always we were asking the question each time it was time
for a new treatment, is there a new study?
Is there a good clinical trial to go on?
And so, this is where we're at now.
- I want to ask, I was talking to my son Ben yesterday.
And we're just wondering what's going to happen next.
So I know that there, including today,
there are three more, right? Three more
- Treatments.
Right. Presumably if everything still looks stable,
we'll have to make a decision.
We'll have to decide,
Should we kind of just wait and sort of see how things go
and decide whenever we want.
The study may say you have to wait till March for a CT scan.
We may decide we wanna get it earlier.
If we're not doing anything, we could at that time go
to the Xeloda, you know, kind
of our backup option had been oral Xeloda pills,
but we might just observe, you know, the idea of
immunotherapy sometimes allowing
the body to have time.
- Right. - So you, you've been feeling really well not
having to do this kind of a toxic treatment, so
- Oh gosh, so much better.
I know. Yeah, I know.
Hopefully I will not have to go on Xeloda
Yeah, I feel like pushing that out as long
as possible is one
of the ideas we've been trying to accomplish.
Immunotherapy was just an idea 20 plus years ago
and now it's the standard of care.
Even in breast cancer, as I mentioned, you know,
immunotherapy has been late to the game
in breast cancer, but in triple negative breast cancer,
it's a standard of care.
We're hoping we can find some of these treatments
that are standard of care in other
subtypes of breast cancer.
But it's been amazing, the idea that you can do something
that makes your own body fight your cancer,
of course is something patients are interested in,
doctors are interested in,
there's less side effects potentially from it,
maybe different side effects.
But immunotherapy has come so far in the last 20 years.
- Olga is one
of my patients on a clinical trial I coordinate here.
Dr. Conlin knew she wanted specifically the ANK-101
injection drug for Olga,
- Probably like six o'clock. Okay.
- We got Olga started in the beginning of July
and at this point she's had six treatments.
- The ANK-101 treatment Olga has been receiving is the human
version of the cytokines used by Dr.
Fan in treating Desi
and Milton during the University
of Illinois veterinary trials.
- I mean, what's so interesting about this trial is
that this is the same exact drug, ANK-101 was used in dogs
and shown to be effective and now we're using it in humans.
- All right, we'll get Dr. Gibson.
Olga has metastatic advanced breast cancer with the help
of the interventional radiology team here and Dr.
Conlan, we chose three lesions
to inject.
- Okay. Reviewing the imaging on Olga
before doing her injection.
There are three areas that we're going to treat today.
The first is a new area.
It's here along the left chest wall.
You can see there's an abnormal soft tissue mass
measures about 2.6 centimeters in size.
The next site we are going
to treat is an additional chest wall mass,
which is a little harder to see,
but it involves the muscle here along the left chest wall
involving the, the pectus musculature
and extending into the soft tissues.
And the last place
to treat will be a lymph node in the left axilla
or armpit, which also measures about 2.5 centimeters.
Each one of these will receive one milliliter
of investigational drug injected
- In the very beginning when Olga began this trial,
so four and a half months ago I saw her being very brave,
ready to just take it on
and, you know, getting injections
for an experimental therapy into your cancer
lesions in particular in the breast area
is vulnerable.
- Ready to go today?
- Yeah. Okay. Do I have a choice?
- Yeah. I do. You do have a choice? Yeah, I do. Okay.
So we're doing three sites today, right?
Two on the left chest wall, one in the armpit,
just like we've done before.
- Okay. She's tough.
Most every patient I've ever helped is tough as nails.
Very resilient.
And they, they often don't let their loved ones,
or even me see them
have a tough time, you know?
But every now
and then we get a glimpse of things being hard on them
and we do our very best to support them through it.
So what she's going through,
even though she's doing better,
it's still hard for her.
- The drug gets injected directly into the tumor.
- Alright, you ready to go? We're gonna inject the,
- And then ultrasound guided injections.
- So I'm slowly injecting the drug
and I'm moving the needle around to get it
to different locations up the tumor.
- He then is able to
connect the syringe to the guide needle
and inject the tumor at that time, fanning the drug out
and it's usually given over a couple of minutes per lesion.
And then we move on to the next lesion for injection.
- This was a great fit for her
'cause we can inject into the tumor, which can kind
of change the tumor microenvironment.
That's something pretty important in immunotherapy.
Good first one done. Good job.
- Okay, let's go to the next.
- And so far it's been working.
She's had really good response in the places we've injected.
Some of the other places have stabilized.
Theoretically those should be growing if something
isn't happening in her body.
So I think the idea is we're injecting tumors,
her body's coming, it's making a response
and then kind of going nearby potentially
and helping other areas respond.
That's kind of the holy grail,
- Really nice work that went so well.
- Olga has advanced cancer
and where she's at, she's going to be living with it
for the rest of her life.
So overall, we're very pleased with
how Olga's doing on this trial.
And she's been able to maintain a quality of life,
which is the most important thing.
Stay warm.
If you start feeling the jitters as you know.
Yeah. You know what that feels like.
Pile on blankets, do whatever you need to do.
- And the dog
And the dog. Yes cuddle with your dog.
That's a perfect idea. Hot water.
It's like a hot water bottle, right?
The word hope is really tricky in oncology.
I feel like we can hope for realistic things,
but I, I really try not to tell a patient how to hope.
Obviously the dream, of course is
to kill all the cancer
and it goes away completely for her to be cured.
That just isn't the reality right now at this point.
It would be great if we could discover that
and find the right treatment for her in that setting.
But, really, the the primary goal
with her is control spread of disease.
- I never really thought that I could die.
This thought for some reason.
Never kind of entered my mind.
I guess I was greedy to live.
And that's another thing.
This fight was without any resentment.
I never asked why me,
I just took it the way it was a disease
and at this point it's a chronic disease.
I don't even know why.
I didn't really worry that it's a very beginning
of this particular study.
I think it was more worrisome for my family,
but I just have this silly tendency to believe
that everything is going to be okay
and that I'm just lucky that this,
we found out about this study and maybe it'll fix me.
- Okay.
- Ready to go for a walk.
Serena Sabuda lives in Washington, DC
with her husband Matt and their dog, Milo.
For the past seven years,
Serena has been battling osteosarcoma.
- So I was diagnosed
with osteosarcoma when I was 20 years old
and I just finished the clinical trial right
before I was about to turn 26.
Being diagnosed with cancer at 20 years old is
definitely difficult.
For five years I was doing toxic chemo,
super invasive surgery to more chemo,
to relapsing, to more surgery,
relapsing again.
And that happened about six times.
But in the back of my head, I just kept thinking about
what happens when I run out of treatment options.
Then that's it.
Like, then there's nothing else for me to do.
Because osteosarcoma is such a rare cancer, the community
is very strong.
It's a lot of like Facebook groups
and like social media groups
where people will come and chat.
There is one nonprofit charity
for specifically osteosarcoma research.
And so they put on a conference every year.
- It's a very unusual and,
and one of my favorite conferences in as much
as the patients
and the patient families are there together
with the researchers and the clinicians.
I think I was
- 21 years old at the time
and I was particularly interested in
Dr. Mason's talk because she was a veterinarian
and it was titled Old Tricks and New Leads for Dogs with os
and being a dog lover, that just really piqued my
- Interest.
I know her story to some extent
and my understanding is
that Serena was actually in the audience
- And she presented some very promising research
that it was currently helping dogs with osteosarcoma.
And they were currently investigating how
that could potentially be translated over to humans.
I mean, it sounds really cool,
but I thought that maybe this would be a treatment in 10,
20 years or so.
Yeah, I didn't think it would be so soon.
So when my oncologist first told me about the clinical
trial, it was pretty scary.
But also because I had heard about the trial earlier
and knew it was tested on dogs
and now it was gonna be in humans, I was super hopeful
and really excited at the chance to
be able to be cured of osteosarcoma.
Yay. The clinical trial,
it was basically one day at the hospital getting the
infusion every three weeks.
And that was for 48 weeks.
And so it was a total of,
I think, 16 treatments.
Throughout the treatment.
I was getting three month CT scans
and each CT scan would come back and they would be good.
And then I finished treatment and I always really struggle
after I finish treatment
because I'm basically leaving my body up
to whatever it wants to do.
But I kept getting good scans even after the treatment.
And that's something that has never happened to me before.
- So I was at a hill briefing on the topic
of creating a canine cancer registry
and presented the work of the comparative oncology program.
A young woman in the audience stood up and said
I have osteosarcoma and I am alive today
because of a trial that I was treated with at Hopkins
that was based on the canine listeria HER2 trial.
- I didn't have a question.
I just wanted people to know
that I am currently on the trial, the human trial
that Dr. Leblanc is talking
and giving you all a briefing on.
And I let everyone know that I had relapsed like
seven times.
And since being on the trial, I have been
disease free for the longest time ever.
And that the trial might be working for me.
- I had no idea that I would be fortunate enough
to meet somebody who could stand there
and bravely tell their story about
how our work had impacted her directly.
And it was just a really powerful moment for me.
Serena Sabuda is a warrior against osteosarcoma.
- I ended up visiting her lab at the NIH.
It was just really fascinating hearing all about all the
data she's collecting and all the research that she's doing
and seeing osteosarcoma under a microscope.
'cause I was just intrigued
and it was kind of, it was a weird moment seeing
the literal thing that is trying to kill me.
I think comparative oncology is just like a really
new and cool way to view cancers.
Now we have become
advanced enough to where we are able to use
even other species to kind of try
to cure osteosarcoma.
- So why don't you click on the doctor note.
- Okay. These scans just came in
and they're still good
- Trial's still working.
- It's always crazy to me that there are scientists
and veterinarians out there
that is their full-time job is
looking at canine cancers, osteosarcoma,
trying to come up with a cure.
And I am one of the people that they are
trying to cure
- Her oncologists and the folks that cared for her
and enrolled on the listeria trial at Hopkins.
Of course, they are the ones
who are responsible for saving her life.
But is it possible that our work
and our willingness to do new things and break boundaries
and offer that experience in dogs to the physician world
might have had a role there?
I'd love to think that that's true.
I would love to think that maybe incrementally we are
helping change the face of how
that disease is cared and managed.
- Comparative oncology research
and clinical trials for a growing number
of cancers continues across the country.
Scientists are embracing cutting edge technologies such
as artificial intelligence, in-depth DNA sequencing
and advanced 3D imaging to explore the complexity
of tumors like never before.
Analyzing massive amounts of data
and pushing the search for lifesaving treatments forward.
- This imaging will give us the information we need
to think very carefully about rational
therapeutic strategies.
And having this level of data
and just a fundamental understanding of the disease
and how it grows and develops in the lung will be
transformative for the way
that we think about the next generation of clinical trials.
- What my objective is as sort of a physicist
and an engineer, is to give you more information,
to give you a complete three-dimensional reconstruction
of all the relevant biomolecules.
And that's gonna help you figure out better ways
of attacking this disease.
- You know, one thing I often say to my kids
and to people on my team, like,
what got us here is not going to be
what gets us there.
Obviously, what has been going on
for the last 40 years in pediatric oncology
has not moved the needle at all.
So it's time for some fresh perspective
and some new thinking.
So that's what I'm really hopeful for in the future.
Let's go.
- What we were always told in the study by everyone who,
who we came into contact with was just
how important the study with the dogs was.
Because if it worked,
it could have this huge impact on pediatric osteosarcoma.
You know, even though how heartbreaking
and scary it was to go through everything,
the outcome was completely worth it.
His last scan was at the end of March.
- Still clear? Yes. Everything clear? Still clear
- You are a rockstar, aren't you?
- Yep. He'll be seven in the fall, if you can believe it.
No way. Yep. Seven
- Dogs are amazing, absolutely amazing.
And I think we're gonna see a lot more
of the comparative oncology approach being implemented,
and then I think that's really gonna drive home the value
of looking at canine patients
with naturally occurring cancers
to advance human clinical trials.
- I would really like to thank
Dr. Nicola Mason for the work that she
and her lab have been doing all these years,
and for having the vision not just to help her patients,
which are dogs, but also my patients, which are children,
because both
of these groups really deserve a chance at life,
especially in the face of such a monstrous,
devastating disease
Like osteosarcoma.
- Duke, the first dog we treated, was an absolute pioneer
and his owner was, you know,
an absolute pioneer to do something.
And this, this is the same thing that gets faced
with human patients.
That's a very brave person,
but that, that's how science proceeds, you know,
we have people that are willing to take chances.
If we knew that this was gonna work,
we wouldn't have to do the study.
Okay. And that's this,
this whole enterprise is based upon brave people coming
forward and willing to do, to participate in trials.
- Dogs are helping people
because lots of them went into remission as a result
of this clinical trial.
And now people can be treated with the same,
basically same drug to, you know,
help them go into remission.
It actually fascinates me in general, you know,
how close we are and how connected we are,
but in this case it's just,
it's completely amazing.
- This is the whole idea about discovery, right?
To really hope that we can reactivate our immune system
and we won't know until we try.
I feel privileged
to be involved in these type of discoveries.
It is a group effort,
and I'm glad that we can work together as a community
to improve and bring forth
new technologies that are gonna help pets
and pet owners. Help our research profession rise
to greater and greater heights of recognition
and hopefully to have those
same technologies really be impactful
to saving lives and curing cancer in people
- Center.
Good boy, stay.
Dogs have helped me in more ways than one.
I mean, my own dog has helped me
mentally when I was at the darkest place of my life
and physically getting outta the house and walking around.
And then the fact that these dogs
that I don't even know have potentially,
hopefully cured my cancer is just, it's mind blowing
and truly unbelievable.
And I'm so grateful.
- I've adopted a love for morning runs,
- I've adopted a love for getting interrupted.
- I've adopted a love for landscaping
- At Petco Love,
We believe when you adopt a pet, there's so much more
to love about life.
That's why since 1999, we've brought pets in need
and people together with 6.5 million pets, adopted
and counting Petco Love proud supporter
of Shelter Me proud supporter of love.