University Wisconsin, Madison School of Veterinary Medicine has developed cancer vaccine for the treatment of melanoma in dogs.
They have worked in collaboration with the oncologist from Arizona, California, and Michigan. This newly developed anti-cancer vaccine is very efficient in preventing the death of the animal, but not all dogs with melanoma respond to this treatment. Ilene Kurzman, a researcher in the veterinary medical school's oncology section said that this will one day be an important step towards developing anti-cancer therapy for humans.Melanoma, is a type of skin cancer which is very aggressive in dogs. Characteristic symptoms are seen but the mortality rate (75%) with the conventional treatment was very high. about 40 % of dogs with melanoma responded very well to the vaccine and in 12.5% the tumor completely disappeared.
The vaccine is developed from the dog melanoma cells that are treated so that they are no longer cancerous and grown in the laboratory.this DNA is inserted into the cells which secrete an immune stimulant. Then it is injected into the patient’s skin to stimulate the immune response, against the melanoma cells.
Dogs that received the vaccine lived twice as long as dogs that did not receive the vaccine. But further research has to be done to analyse the details of the vaccine completely.
