Vaccine Trials Give Hope to Dogs

In people, a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is scary enough. In dogs, well, that’s a whole other problem. While it’s not a common occurrence, it’s often devastating. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine are demonstrating the first glimmers of hope: they have developed a vaccine. So far, so good. According to Penn Vet’s assistant professor Nicola Mason, the aim is to either prevent, or at the very least delay recurrence of the disease.

From Science Daily:

The team recruited dogs that were brought to Penn’s Matthew J. Ryan Veterinary Hospital with newly diagnosed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to receive the experimental vaccine following standard induction chemotherapy and confirmation of clinical remission.

“We vaccinated dogs, which were in clinical remission following chemotherapy, three times,” Mason said. “We then tracked them over several years to see if the vaccine would prevent relapse and would prolong overall survival.

“We found that, although the vaccinated dogs still relapsed with clinical disease when they were treated with rescue chemotherapy, they had significantly increased overall survival times when compared to an unvaccinated control group. Some of these dogs are still alive and cancer free more than three years later.”

This is how veterinary advances happen – one research success at a time.

Do you have a dog that has had or currently has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Share with us.

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