For a long time, dogs have become man's best friend. With the rise of "comparative oncology", the bond between humans and their dogs are going beyond friendship. Comparative oncology allows researchers to study the similarities between humans and dogs in order to cure some of the world's tricky illnesses such as cancer.
According to an article by CNN, cancer has been one of the leading causes of death not just for humans but also for dogs. With this, cancer research has been on the rise in the field of veterinary sciences. Seeing the trends between dogs and humans for the past years, several specialists from the field of veterinary science and human oncology united to work on comparative oncology.
Dr. Nicole Ehrhart of Colorado State University shared in the same article of CNN that dogs have closer characteristics with humans compared to mice which have a shorter life. She also imparted that based from studies, dogs have 80 percent genetic similarity to humans whereas mice only have 67 percent.
Through the years, several types of cancer research on dogs were found out to be similar to the cases in humans. Ehrhart shared that bone cancer and bladder cancer on dogs share the same genetic mutations with humans.
In an earlier research published in Nature, Melissa Paolini and Chand Khanna revealed in their journal article entitled "Translation of New Cancer Treatments from Pet Dogs to Humans" that aside from the genetic mutations, humans and dogs have common features when it comes to their cancer histories. Both humans and dogs have the similar histological appearance, tumor genetics, and even response to cancer therapies.
Since dogs and humans share not only some genetic features but also treatment responses to cancer, this paves the way to bigger opportunities in finding solutions in treating cancer for both species. If a dog responded greatly to a new treatment for cancer, there's a higher chance that it would also be applicable to humans and vice versa.
