This AKC-CHF sponsored award supported the successful development of a comprehensive canine tumor sequencing panel (“canine oncopanel”) using cutting-edge, next-generation sequencing technology.
The canine oncopanel detects a wide-spectrum of changes (nucleotide variations, insertions, deletions, copy number variants etc) in 284 selected genes. The selected genes were chosen based on cancer studies and publicly available datasets from human and dog tumor genomic analyses. The selected genes that are interrogated by the canine oncopanel are known to be involved in tumor-driving pathways in canine B cell lymphoma and other cancers, and in pathways that play critical roles in tumor development and progression of many different tumor types. The canine oncopanel covers a large target region across the canine genome and can also be used to estimate the mutational load” or tumor mutational burden (TMB) of a tumor. In humans, this has been shown to be predictive of response to immunotherapies. We envision that our canine oncopanel can be used to interrogate each individual patient’s tumor, rapidly and cost effectively determining its mutation profile, and revealing potential driver mutations, clinically-relevant biomarkers such as druggable targets, prognostic markers and markers that predict treatment response. This would pave the way for personalized diagnostics and precision treatment for dogs with DLBCL (and other tumors).
Furthermore, the panel will help to direct future development of targeted therapies or repurposing of pre-existing therapeutics that could be used in those patients mostly likely to benefit from them (based on their tumor’s profile). We believe that this approach will lead to improved outcomes for canine patients with DLBCL and potentially other tumors. On-going work will now determine whether tumor profiling using this approach can be used to predict outcome of dog with DLBCL treated with standard CHOP based chemotherapy.
