These Three Dogs With Metastatic Cancer Made an Amazing Recovery

Watch the video recording here.

Mari Maeda: Today, I'm joined by Kasey Bentz and Rick Kneisel, and we're going to talk about, we're going to hear stories about a couple of dogs who just had really miraculous recovery, and I also want to introduce Lydia.

Lydia is a volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, and we're doing a fundraiser, Walk and Run, in May. So, on May 4th, in Redmond, Washington, we have a big 5k and a walk, and Lydia is organizing a walk in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Lydia: Amazing. Well, thank you for that introduction, Mari, and hello, everybody. My name is Lydia. I, like Mari said, am in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, I just believe in Mari and the vision of the Canine Cancer Alliance, and, you know, our family, my family had a dog that passed from cancer in 2015, so this cause is also very near and dear to my heart, and I'm just so excited to be here. I hope everybody here takes something away.

I'm so excited to bring on Rick and Kasey, they have some amazing success stories. We have these two dog owners, and we're going to bring them on and just hear more about their story.

I'd love for each of you to just briefly introduce yourself and talk about your dog.

Kasey Benz: I'm Kasey Benz. I live here in western Washington as well, and my dog is sitting behind me over here somewhere. In 2015, I was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I lived there with my husband. I had never owned a dog before. I grew up living in apartments, and we couldn't have a dog, but anyone you ask that knows me will tell you probably the first thing they will say about me is that I'm a huge animal lover, and I especially love dogs, and I've always wanted one.

So, I did a lot of searching for several years while I was up there and could not find the perfect dog. There were a lot of sled dogs up there, and I felt like that would be a big task for me to take on. So, I found a breeder of Akitas, and I went and saw the puppies and fell in love with the biggest, fluffiest dog in the litter.

I adopted him in 2015, and yeah, he's been the best perfect fit for our family. Beautiful. There's nothing like that moment when you know which dog is yours.

Rainier, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma that had spread to his lungs.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Kasey and Rick. I know your dog is no longer with us, but I'd love to just know more about your story and how you came to own Ranger.

Rick Kneisel: I'm an old biology teacher here that lives in Ohio, and I had not had a dog for a long time. My mom, I came back to Ohio to take care of my mom in 2000, well 2009, and she passed in 2012, and it was then, okay, I'm on by myself up here, the old house that I grew up in when I was a kid, and started thinking, well, maybe it's time for me to get a dog that I would like to have, and I saw one, just a litter that was over probably about 40 miles away from me, and I said, well, I'll go over and drive over there and see, and they had this litter, a family out by Rocky Fork Lake, and they were in a playpen inside the house, and most of the dogs, most of the puppies had already been accounted for, but I saw this one, very light colored, that's what I wanted. I was desiring a light colored puppy, a golden retriever, and when you looked at it, I just knew that it looked like it had a little bit more intelligence than the others.

Ranger was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, and the cancer spread to his lungs.

He was a little bit more playful than the others, and I didn't go there with the desire of picking out a dog. I picked out a dog, and so they asked me what I wanted to call him, and I think I chose the name Ranger because I'm a Lord of the Rings fan, and I liked the main character there was a ranger, it was called a ranger, I said, you know, that's a perfect name for this dog, and it turned out to be a perfect name for that dog, and so I got him, brought him home in 2012, and found the joy that you have, the investment that you have with your heart and your money and everything else that you have for your dogs, and I know Mark, the whole reason why I think that he switched from human biology, finding a cure for many things that he had developed, is because his love of dogs, and his love of his dog that he had, and still has, and so I felt that, and that's the reason why this pup and Mari's work of trying to find a solution for all of us is so important.

Lydia: Wow, well said Rick, thank you so much for bringing us back into your story. I also kind of want to talk about, you know, for both of you, the moments that you found out your dogs had cancer, so Kasey, I'm going to start with you, what was that moment like?

Kasey Benz: Man, it was terrible, I can't, it's hard to even talk about it. Rainier was limping, and he's a big boy, but he can get around pretty well, and he for like two days had a little bit of a limp, and so I know when something's not right with him. Usually it's something minor, and I overreact a little bit, but I thought we should go into urgent care and just get it checked out. So I took him in, and I really had already planned in my head what this was, like he either sprained his ankle, or he might at the very worst have Lyme disease, is what I thought, because he gets into some brush with ticks and things. As soon as the veterinarian, they did some imaging, and then as soon as the veterinarian came in and told us that, she just had a look on her face, and she said it's bone swelling in his leg, and I just started crying and said, told my husband, like he has bone cancer, and he was like, let's just wait and hear what she has to say. She's like, it can only be a couple things, and the most likely is osteosarcoma, and she, I don't know what the reasoning for the response was, but I speculate that because canine cancer treatment is so expensive. She didn't really push the idea of going to an oncologist, so she pretty much said prepare for a couple more months with him, so...

Lydia: And that was, when was that Kasey?

Kasey Benz: That was September 2023, and thankfully, like I thought, I didn't know there were other options, thankfully I have a good friend who used to be a veterinary nurse, and she said you need to get him into the quickest oncology appointment you can. Just call all of them and find the quickest one that you can get into, so we got in at Blue Pearl and Tacoma, and that's where everything with the treatment started.

Lydia: Okay, so tell me about the treatment journey, and when you discovered, you know, the work that CCA is doing.

Kasey Benz: So Blue Pearl, Tacoma, we had our initial oncology appointment with Dr. Sarah Broom there, she's really great, I will speak highly of her every day as well. She started with trying to do a biopsy, and we didn't get a sufficient, like, sample initially, but she did say that we can assume that it's osteosarcoma based on what we see, and the best course of action right now is to start carboplatin chemotherapy and have his leg amputated as soon as possible, and I don't think Dr. Broom was aware of the canine cancer vaccine initially, but one of her colleagues was, and I overheard him speaking to someone else about the vaccine, and so I asked, and they gave me more information and said at the time, I think they were just aware of the Washington State University clinic, so they said call the veterinary teaching hospital there and get in as soon as you can, and when I called, they said you had to have the amputation completed first, and we had that scheduled for about a month after diagnosis, and we had started our first dose of chemotherapy at that time.

Rainier did super well. The surgeon told us that the biggest hurdle to amputation for a dog is the owner, and that's completely accurate in our case. I was upset, and my husband was even more devastated learning that he was going to lose his leg, but Rainier recovered.

He's had three TPLO knee surgeries, well two, and then a follow-up surgery, and those recoveries were really long. The amputation was so fast, I mean the recovery. He just was trying to hop around the second day, and I just knew like he wasn't ready to go.

Kasey Benz: He's always had just, he fights for everything, like he just wants to be alive, he had the first vaccine dose in October of 23, and then the second one in November, and we continued with the carboplatin and did imaging every couple months to make sure that the cancer wasn't spreading, and it went really well for about eight months, and then we found out that there was a mass in his lung, and I was pretty devastated by that because I had hoped that like we were done with cancer now, and I didn't know what to do. I started looking at more trials. I found out about another trial for minimally invasive laparoscopic removal of canine cancer or lung metastasis, and I called them, tried to get in.

We did a CT scan, and he looked like a good candidate at first, but then we found out the mass was too big, and I just felt like there were no other options. Dr. Broom suggested Palladia, but Rainier did really terrible on Palladia. Immediately, he stopped eating and drinking.

He wouldn't go outside due to the bathroom. I honestly thought we were going to euthanize him in October of 2024, but I emailed Dr. Mamula, and he called me back. He immediately called me, and we talked on the phone for a significant period of time, and I will never forget how kind you were, Mark.

That made a huge difference for us, but he looked over Rainier's records and said he is a candidate for a booster, and there's a clinic closer to you. You don't need to drive out to eastern Washington again, so he helped facilitate that, and Rainier got his booster, and we kind of decided after the booster, there's no more treatment options, so let's just see how long. Let's just give him a good life, and imaging was getting expensive and stuff, so we just kind of let it go from there, and he did really well.

He got on some thyroid medication just because he's an older guy, and he has a ton of energy now, but he got pretty ill in the beginning of this month, the beginning of April (2025), and I was really concerned that the cancer had metastasized, and I was terrified to find out, but he needed to go to the vet, so we went in and had some x-rays done, and the vet came in, and they were like, we don't know what happened, but the cancer is gone, and yeah, it just it's so incredible that this is the outcome. I didn't ever expect it, but I'm really grateful, and for everyone that's been involved in, I mean, in Mari and Mark's team, and yeah.

Lydia: Wow.

Lydia: What were you feeling in that moment?

Kasey Benz: I just, at first, I think the first thing I said was like, can you look at it again and make sure, because I didn't want to have, just be that excited, and then the results were wrong or something, but she was like, no, this is really, like, we've had multiple radiologists look at it. He does not have a mass in his lung anymore, and yeah, it was, I mean, Rainier is my best friend. I think my husband knows Rainier is my best friend, so having, being able to, for him to make it to another birthday is more than I had ever hoped for, and it's like the best news.

Lydia: So, Kasey, what was the response you got from your Blue Pearl provider? Was it, oh, we see this all the time, or?

Kasey Benz: No, it really, they, Dr. Broom looked, like, really confused at first. She was like, I, we just don't, and I think she, yeah, she, I think she said something like, I don't know exactly what happened, but I don't, I learned to not ask questions anymore when we get a good outcome, and then her and her team started calling Rainier Benjamin Button, and then I reminded her of the vaccine.

Lydia: Wow, amazing.

I feel, I felt myself getting emotional when you talked about the moment that you found out that you were going to get, you know, more time with your best friend, Kasey. That's incredible, and yeah, like, let us all just take a moment to, to witness the, the miracle that that is, and it's because of things that Mari and Professor Mark are doing with Canine Cancer Alliance, and it's really important for us to support their journey to continue to help more dogs like Rainier, right, survive the, this terrible disease, so again, I included the link to sign up and donate to the White Love Life Walk, and I really encourage all of you to, to do that, to sign up for the walk, donate, whatever you can, it all makes a difference, and so with that, Rick, I would, I'm curious to know about your journey with Ranger and the moment that you found out about Ranger's cancer.

Rick Kneisel: Well, Lydia, I'm, I'm going to be up front with you right now.

If I start crying, I apologize. That dog has meant so much to me about that, and hearing Kasey's story brought it all back to me again. You can already hear it in my voice.

Yeah. Ranger, very playful dog. I mean, he chased frisbees, tennis balls, bring them back to me. He would go out to the lake, and I would throw two tennis balls out in the water, as far as I could, he'd go get them, bring them back, so one day in March, 2012, or 2019, we were out playing in the yard, throwing him a ball. It had just rained really hard the day before, so the grass was a little wet, and I threw the ball, and he got it, but then he started limping, just like in Kasey's case for Rainier, and of course, you think, okay, he's just pulled a muscle. He's got a sprain or something, and you leave it a couple of days, but it doesn't get any better, and so I make an appointment.

We take him to the vet, and she looks at him and everything else, and she comes back and tells, well, we'll give him some pain medications, and at the end of the visit, she said, well, let's just hope it's not, and then she stopped, and I said, what? We hope it's not what? And then she said, osteosarcoma. I'd never heard the word before. Never heard of any of those cancers at all, and I said, osteosarcoma, and she said, it's a cancer.

It's a bone cancer, and I said, oh, and so anyway, we left, and here I am, still thinking that we've got just a sprained ankle. Didn't get better. Went back.

She took x-rays, and she saw a meshy portion of the bone indicating that it was osteosarcoma. We sent it to Ohio State. They came back and said it was probably an 85% chance that it was osteosarcoma, and so I did do a bone biopsy, nothing that I really wanted to do because it's painful for the dog, and it's got a needle that's got to go down into the bone and withdraw some cells, and they sent that off, and then it said 95% that it was a chance of bone cancer.

I was just like Kasey. I didn't want that to happen. I didn't want a four-legged dog that was running around crazily and to be able to be just on three legs.

Rick Kneisel: Those first two weeks after the amputation is pretty tough. I mean, it's... Ranger was a big dog, a big golden. You know, he weighed about 95 pounds, and so to try to get around on three legs right away and learn how to do that, you didn't know whether he was going to go to the bathroom or not.

You know, he was still on a nerve block. He still had a fentanyl patch, everything else. You worried about him going to the bathroom, going up and down the steps and everything, and so it was about two weeks before things started to turn around and be good.

At that time, after that, started carboplatin. He had four rounds of carboplatin, and I said, okay, that's good, and they took an x-ray after that, and sure enough, a lung met (metastasis)  had shown up, and so I quit the carboplatin. There wasn't any use in still doing that, and I took him home. I looked up on the internet and found that there was a clinical trial with an experimental drug at Ohio State, so I went and signed up for that. Again, another big cost to be able to sign up for it, but once he's in, he was then on their program, and he got in. I'd have to take him every week to Ohio State so that they could inject him with doxorubicin, another type of chemo, and then they would send home with me a pill, a drug that I would give him every day for that week, a very powerful drug because I had to use gloves to handle it and everything, a type of propase that was going to try to block the replication of the cancer cells, and then at the end of that trial, which took about two months, it wasn't working.

The lung mat was continuing to grow, and nothing was stopping, and in the meantime, I'd called Mark. I'd seen someone else. I mean, something else about this Yale vaccine. I said, well, Yale vaccine, well, let me try this. Let me call him or write him. I wrote him first, and he was very kind, like Kasey said.

I mean, unbelievably kind. I'll get through this here in a minute, so I called him, and he said, yes, we would love to have Ranger in this trial. We want the dogs with metastasis with some sort of lung mat, and so he entered.

At that time, which was wonderful, you didn't have to travel. That program, one of the first phases, the drug was sent, the vaccine was sent to your veterinarian if they were willing to give it, and so that's the case here. So Ranger got his first vaccine in November of 2019, and then three weeks later, he got the second portion of that shot.

I went back to the vet, or I was still taking him to Ohio State because they wanted to monitor the lung mat, and so I took him back on Christmas Eve 2019, and they gave me the news. The lung mat had stopped growing. It's been stationary.

Great news. I go back two months later, and it's gone. The lung mat is gone. So yeah, two heroes, Mark Mamula and Mari, that's my story with Ranger.

Mark Mamula: So I can tell you with experience in having met Ranger and, of course, Rick. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. I happened to have been there visiting my mother, who was still alive at the time, and Rick said, well, I'll come up and visit, and he brought Ranger with him, and all our pups are special, but I'm not shy to say Ranger, although not my pup, was a real special one. Rick and I and Ranger went for a walk around the Notre Dame campus. Boy, talk about a magnet for humanity. We could not walk about 10 or 15 feet before students were all over Ranger, ignoring Rick and I, which is fine, but Ranger was a terrific one, and Rick remains a terrific friend, of course, and was or is still one of the poster pups of our early investigations, and just what a special experience it all was and continues to be, honestly.

Rick Kneisel: Thanks, Mark. I appreciate that, and thanks for jumping in before I fell apart completely.

Lydia: Thank you. Well, I just want to say, Rick, I think we all appreciate your bravery to be emotional here with all of us, because I'm sure you're not the only one, and Kasey and everybody here, and for us to see that other people go through a similar experience, that we're not alone in this, is incredibly healing. Former baseball, football coach, and everything else, but I'm not supposed to be showing these kind of emotions, you know, so, but when it comes to our dogs, we do, all of us.

So, I lost my own dog from cancer, and I know Mari has as well, and there's an experience you never want to repeat, of course, but, you know, the great pleasure of having companions like we all do comes with, the unfortunate reality is that they will not survive as long, usually, as we do, but the trade-off is honestly worth it. I lost my own, gosh, now about 14 years ago, and, but, you know, and can still, can still feel it.

Lydia: I have two other Golden Retrievers now and they sit alongside of, you know, the one I lost and, you know, that's just the way it is for all of us.

Mark Mamula: Yeah, same here. Our family's dad passed 10 years ago from cancer and anytime we bring him up as a family, we can't not all break into tears. And to be honest, it brings us closer to talk about those memories and to feel emotional about it.

Lydia: And I love what you said that piece, Mark, about the trade-off is worth it. And in the hurt of the grief, it shows our capacity to love, to have that unconditional love for our dogs who also share that unconditional love for us. It's incredibly special.

Mari: Mike, can you take five minutes and share Cody's story?

Mike: Cody started limping. I took him to a vet, they did an x-ray. Most of his bone was eaten away. The vet said I had to do something—either get an amputation or put him down.

Codi was nine years old when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma.

I started looking around on Google and found Mark's trial with Yale. I ran up to Connecticut, got two shots, and then we came back and waited to see what happened.

About eight months later, Cody was still with us. I was surprised because the tumor he had was the size of a golf ball in his lung. We didn’t think there was much hope for that. We ran back up to Connecticut, got another x-ray, and the golf ball tumor was gone.

He lived another three and a half years after that. He ended up passing from hemangiosarcoma. Somehow, the osteosarcoma was gone. He was fine, running around with three legs and doing everything.

Then he got hemangiosarcoma, and unfortunately, he lasted only a couple of months after that, even with the booster shot.

We donated Cody for a necropsy, with Yale covering the cost, and all the results were sent there. Hopefully, it helps.

Rick: I want to thank you for starting the Canine Cancer Vaccine facebook group page . I would have never found out about Mark and the vaccine. It’s through you and your effort that I was able to get the help I needed for Ranger. I appreciate that very much.

Mike: You're welcome. As soon as we found out, my wife and I were all over Facebook, all over the bone cancer sites, sharing what happened. Christine, whose dog the site is named after, suggested making a Facebook page so we wouldn’t have to keep posting in different places and dealing with constant messages.

Unfortunately, her dog passed. The vaccine didn’t work, and I haven’t spoken with her in a while.

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

Q: When can the vaccine come to Canada? Because we've got a lot of Canadian dog owners up here, and I feel like we're all missing out. Everywhere I walk in Vancouver, there's dogs, so you've got a market here.

A: Oh, we definitely will. We actually have, don't tell anybody, but we already have lots of patients in Canada. We  did have a clinic in Canada that could no longer be a trial site. But Canada, of course, like the United States, is a large place. See, if I say anything here that we would love to be all over Canada, Hester and Rennell will start to wince, because that just means more data, more clinics to keep up with.. There are a number of dogs who travel to Washington State to Bridge Animal Referral Center, BARC, Dr. Chelsea Tripp's clinic, or to Washington State University, and also others have traveled to Chicago, Illinois locations as well.

Q: Mark, can you say a little bit about Washington State University's result with dogs who couldn't get amputation? What happened to those dogs?

A: So, yes, we have a special arm of this clinical trial, and it's for osteosarcoma specifically, and it involves not amputation, but palliative radiation along with our therapy. So, palliative radiation is not effective enough in treating this disease. At Washington State University Veterinary Hospital they do have a program utilizing palliative radiation in combination with our immunotherapy therapy. I learned something at a meeting that I was at this week, actually, of why radiation, or in particular palliative radiation, may be effective. 

The short answer is in that radiation starts to break up some of the stromal, which are called stromal layers in the bone around the cancer, allowing immune cells to penetrate slightly better than would otherwise be observed without radiation. So the point here is that we and others, not when I say we, it's collectively the field, is learning a lot about how and why some of these other potential therapies like radiation may be effective. And it's still up to all of us to define the best timing, early in disease, late in disease, what are the other factors that may affect good outcomes, or conversely, and it's important to know the features and the factors that lead to poor outcomes as well. We are not different than treating human cancers. We all know that there's not one particular therapy that will treat all of a particular type of cancer in humans, and such is the case in dogs. A hundred dogs with osteosarcoma or another cancer will probably respond slightly differently, and that's because of features of the tumor, not of the therapy. And what does that mean? Well, it's lots of things like where the tumor starts, where it is, the number of mutations that may arise spontaneously in that tumor, and that differs between different dogs even with the same tumors. And the same is true for human cancers. It depends on a number of other factors like age, breed, gender, and probably other factors we don't even yet appreciate. So our therapy does not cure, and I think virtually all vet oncologists and human oncologists are very resistant to using the word cure. It's a goal, but it's not yet a reality because we do not cure every cancer. Our goal is to slow cancer growth or to stop it. Those are all great things, and at best reverse some tumor growth, which is what you've heard about today. It doesn't happen in every dog, but of course that's a goal. And we are trying to learn what features of the cancers lead to the best outcomes, of course.

Q: Are there any interesting correlational factors that you've seen in the data, which may not have yet reached statistical significance, but are interesting to you right now? Anything from environmental factors to dog breed to supplements to anything at all that's just like, oh wow, that looks a little interesting.

A: Well, in part, the answer to the question lies in logic, right? So I think our data suggest that the earlier the treatment of any kind, including our therapy, is probably better. And of course, that's an obvious explanation is that you want to initiate anything that will help slow or prevent cancer growth as early as possible. And in fact, that's what some of our very early studies that even preceded the present ones indicated. And that would be even the studies in and around the time that Ranger was treated is that we began getting questions about how early should they receive our therapy. And I took a chance and said, well, why don't you do it at the time of diagnosis? And that can even precede, at least in osteosarcoma, potentially other cancers as well. And that in many cases preceded amputation and preceded the use of carboplatin, which we all know typically follows amputation and treating osteosarcoma. And I think, and Hester and Renaud, you can weigh in here as well. I think our sense, again, without statistical relevance, but we're getting it, you know, with all of the data we're acquiring, we're getting this type of information and data. But my sense is that the earlier in treating with our therapy or other therapies is always good. Now, the problem here, as you can imagine, is that apropos of our earlier discussion about dogs not expressing pain is that unfortunately, a lot of the dogs hit the clinics when it is often very late in disease, when there are already...

Q: Is metastasis linear or does it accelerate at a certain point?

A: It is probably the latter. Yeah. Accelerates. And that, and again, this is based on a lot of trials, a lot of trials of data from human cancers, is that the presence of various mutations in a particular cancer can begin to accelerate that in a non-linear form. You know, you can be in quote remission for a while and then experience a relapse that can be quite rapid. And one of the features of why that happens is because cancer growth is very dynamic. It changes over time. Sampling a tumor at day one or month one will be very different in sampling that same tumor two months or four months or six months later. There will be different numbers of mutations. The proteins on the surface of the tumors will change. We know this by many, many studies. So if a couple of those cells that are resistant to therapy or whatever therapy you're on escape and create mutations, that's how it happens in a very rapid onset manner.

Q: Is this a blind study at all or is it open label?

A: At the moment, it's open-label. Everyone's getting it, we are comparing it to cohorts of dogs that have standard of care, but not our therapy, but there is not at the moment a placebo-based trial in our own.

Q: Are there any gut microbiome recommendations that you have that may have correlational factors that the dog could be on during the immunotherapy?

A: There's no data, but there are a couple of companies like Animal Biome that sells fecal transplant oral pills, but there's no any, no data yet for dogs showing that that's going to actually tip things in favor. With human studies, people who are on probiotics didn't quite work well, unless there's one Japanese study with special probiotic that they're using that seems to help immunotherapy patients better, but in general, probiotics weren't helping, but fecal transplant, oral pills were helping human patients.

Q: What is the timeline before we can receive the booster?

A: In general, and again, Hester and Ronel can weigh in because they track and follow these, this data very carefully, but I think our sense is in general, much like getting boosters with other vaccinations, like COVID, for example, where early on, we knew we were likely to need boosters yearly, such as the case, we believe with this therapy as well, anywhere from eight to 10 to 12 months after the initial two injections, a single injection will generally bring immune responses.

Q: How is my dog responding? What are the immune responses?

A: We generally do not share that information with owners in part because the owners will not know what to do with that information. We know, when I say we, it's Hester, Ronel, and myself. We know that there are many good outcomes when immune responses are, can be even on the lower end of what we have defined as a spectrum of the response. And conversely, even dogs that get very high immune responses to our therapy may not do that well. So the lesson here is that, and we know this from human studies as well, is that the magnitude doesn't necessarily always correlate with the outcome, the clinical outcome.

Q: Is the immunotherapy vaccine synergistic with losartan and propranolol?

A: That's a good question. We're tabulating all of these data at the moment. Our sense is that, again, just like in human cancer therapy, generally combination therapies typically do better than single therapies alone. There are barriers to doing that in treating human cancers in part because of large pharma policies, right, is that they don't want to create data that may interfere with outcomes of knowing how their own therapies work. Fortunately, we don't necessarily have those barriers in treating canine cancers, but our sense is that combination therapies will likely be the best strategies here. And that could be checkpoint inhibitors and our therapy, radiation and our therapy, chemotherapy and our therapies. We don't, you know, again, and part of the clinical trial process is in defining which of those may be, may lead to the best outcomes and how to manage those specifically, the timing, for example.

Q: Is there any data for different size dogs?

A: No, not really. The vaccine, our therapy, our immunotherapy, I actually hate calling it a vaccine and prefer to call it an immunotherapy, in part because vaccine lends itself to a certain connotation that you're protected if you get a vaccine, you're protected from whatever, COVID, measles, et cetera, or cancer if you get a vaccine. But it truly is just triggering an immune response to the tumor and we consider it an immunotherapy. But as far as breeds, the large breeds of course have a higher preponderance of diseases, cancers like osteosarcoma, but we, I don't think we've noticed a specific outcome based on size.

Q: Is there data about reversal of lung metastasis?

A: Yeah. So Rick and Kasey are not the only owners that have experienced regression, I'd like to call it, or even just static lung mets that don't change in size. We have now probably a half a dozen or more specific examples that are well-documented. There perhaps are more that we just do not yet have data for.

Q: Ranier got a booster and responded well. If other dogs start getting lung mets and it's still not yet booster time yet, could they request booster a little bit earlier?

A: So again, we have a hands-off policy in managing this clinical trial. That sounds contradictory because it is therapy that was developed in our group. But to kind of protect the relevance and the continuity of the clinical trial, we let all the clinical trial sites specifically manage issues like that.

Q: Any data on hemangiosarcoma, cardiac and splenic?

A: Yes, there's data. We hope to get that in print or in publication soon. I guess I can share because it's been shared publicly already is that there we've seen good outcomes in quote stage one and stage two hemangiosarcomas. Those are less invasive. Stage one is a hemangiosarcoma that's largely restricted to the spleen or its primary site without infiltration into the adjacent tissues or other metastases. So I can tell you that overall survival that we have measured appears better than standard of care alone, which is removing the spleen and doxorubicin typically. And the same is true for stage two. Stage three, not so much. Stage three is aggressive hemangiosarcoma with multiple metastases. And we honestly, there's probably not a drug that exists to manage that stage of the disease.

Q: How about transitional cell carcinoma, bladder cancer?

A: Yeah, bladder cancer. That's been a difficult cancer type to navigate in part because the quote standard of care for bladder cancer varies. We've realized varies widely between the veterinary oncology groups. So there are a number of drugs used to treat that. And unfortunately, it doesn't give us a good baseline that we, I suppose we could dictate which drugs are used, but we don't, we defer. There's one element of this clinical trial that we have to allow ethical treatment of patient dogs, right? And that perspective of ethical treatment can differ somewhat between clinical trial sites based on their personal experience.

Q: Agasaca, anal sac, adenocarcinoma, any success stories? 

A: So the other cancers we have far fewer, and they're not part of the clinical trials at the moment. So while we had treated them in earlier studies, we are not treating that cancer at the moment. So I really can't comment.

---

Check out other articles and videos

• Canine Cancer Causes and Prevention

• Surprising Findings from 2024

• New Canine Cancer Screening Tests

Questions? Email us at info@ccralliance, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can!

Canine Cancer Alliance is a non-profit organization supporting research for canine cancer cures.

All information on the Canine Cancer Alliance website is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional veterinary advice.

Always seek guidance from your veterinarian with any questions regarding your pet’s health and medical condition.