KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY VETERINARY ONCOLOGIST SEARCHES FOR CANCER CURE
Researching and caring for animal cancer patients may help the search for cancer cures in humans.Researching and caring for animal cancer patients may help the search for cancer cures in humans. Dr. Ruthanne Chun, veterinary oncologist and assistant professor of clinical sciences at Kansas State University, is searching for new developments in the fight against cancers. She says the many similarities between animals and humans with the disease can help in finding a cure.
"If animals are developing cancers from something from the environment we can learn how to more effectively use animals as sentinels, and what it might be in the environment that's causing the cancer," Chun said. "Animals also get many similar tumor types as people, and for some tumor types, animals get them more frequently and the natural course of the tumor is much faster than it is in people.
"For instance, if a dog develops a bone tumor, it's very similar to the development of bone tumors in humans," she said. "But humans, maybe 2,000 new cases are diagnosed per year, whereas in dogs maybe 10,000 new cases are diagnosed per year, so we can get a lot of information about that particular tumor and how it responds to therapy in dogs, and then move that therapy information over into humans."
Chun's current research focuses on clinical trials and looking at new chemotherapy drugs, or drugs that have been used in people for a long time, but researchers don't know what the effects are on dogs and cats.
"My main goal is recruiting cases, making sure that regional veterinarians know that I'm here and that I would love to help them out with their cancer cases," Chun said. "I would also like to do some basic research and my main area of interest is with new blood vessel ingrowth into tumors.
"For a tumor to grow it needs to have nutrients, and for nutrients to get there, the tumor has to induce new blood vessels to grow," she said. "It's a huge area of research in human medicine and a lot of other veterinarian oncologists are looking at many different aspects of it."
The tumors Chun is interested in treating are bone tumors in dogs, vaccine-associated sarcomas in cats and mast cell tumors, which are a common skin tumor in dogs.
"I guess with my cancer research in particular, what is really exciting about it is that if we can stop the ingrowth of new blood vessels, we might not have to use chemotherapy," Chun said. "So it's possible that the drugs that we might use to stop blood vessels from growing would be much less toxic than chemotherapy and maybe much more helpful than chemotherapy.
"And if we can use that effectively in dogs and cats, it's possible that they can use that effectively in humans, so that's my longest term goal," she said. "I think realistically, I'm not sure that we're ever going to ever really be able to stop cancer, or at least not in my generation, but the more we understand it, the more we can control it."
