A Comparative Approach to Cancer Biology and Therapy.

摘要

Conventional drug development pathways are unidirectional with agents first considered in preclinical models and then moved sequentially through human clinical trials. With most cancer therapies, this method leaves many questions about the optimal useof these drugs unanswered. Because they are not subject to the same constraints as human trials, translational studies in pet dogs provide an opportunity to answer important questions that remain in the development path of most drugs in a more appropriate and predictive setting. Addressing these questions should improve lead agent selection decrease the number of agents that fail late in the development pipeline and improve the success rate of oncology drugs. In recent years, several studies have established correlations between pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamic, imaging, or efficacy endpoints in comparative oncology studies with pet dogs. Complimenting these efforts has been the opportunity to use genomic and proteomic platforms to understand tumor and tumor-drug biology within these same trials. Indeed, the formal integration of studies that include pet dogs with cancer has recently begun and is becoming a more common part of an innovative cancer drug development process.