Researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) College of Veterinary Medicine have become the first to publish canine bladder cancer organoid data on the National Cancer Institute’s Integrated Data Commons. The team led by Drs. Jonathan P. Mochel and Karin Allenspach-Jorn is part of UGA’s Precision One Health Initiative (POHI), which studies the connections between genetics, the environment, and lifestyle factors and their effects on animal and human health. This research aims to develop personalized medicine, using customized diagnostics and preventive or therapeutic regimens based on molecular profiling.
“When we talk about One Health, people often immediately think of infectious diseases, especially those that can transfer between animals and humans,” said Dr. Mochel. However, the lab takes a different approach by studying diseases that affect both animals and humans, an area that has been somehow overlooked until now, particularly in the context of cardiovascular diseases or even cancer. By leveraging naturally occurring canine models of diseases commonly found in humans—such as cancer, cardiorenal and metabolic diseases, or inflammatory bowel disease—researchers can build a database of various disease presentations and test potential therapies in a preclinical setting before moving on to human clinical trials.
The POHI researchers have developed organoids for canine bladder cancer, a cancer that also occurs in humans. Organoids are 3-D miniature versions of an organ grown in culture, enabling researchers to test various treatments for efficacy and toxicity before ever using the drug in a patient. The lab is working with muscle-invasive bladder cancer, an aggressive subtype that is relatively rare in people but very common in dogs. It is a cancer that has many similarities between dogs and people, and several centers recognize it as a good model of the human disease. However, “using this model is challenging because recruiting enough canine patients for clinical trials takes a long time,” Dr. Allenspach-Jorn said.
That is where organoids come in. With organoids developed from canine tumor tissues, the efficacy of treatments can be assessed more quickly and taken to human and canine trials faster.
Immunofluorescence image of a basal cell marker cytokeratin-5 displayed in green. Nuclei are marked in blue from a 3D canine bladder cancer organoid. Scale bar is in micrometers.
Citation: American Journal of Veterinary Research 85, 10; 10.2460/ajvr.24.07.0212
In addition, the development and archiving of organoids, done in partnership with the NIH, allows researchers to test drug therapies specific to many different iterations of a single disease. According to Allenspach-Jorn, some of the tumors in human and veterinary medicine are quite different from one patient to the next; thus, having a range of organoids from various patients with the same disease is greatly beneficial in the evaluation of potential treatments.
Precision One Health is stepping away from the “one size fits all” approach of treating tumors with every available therapy. Knowing that a specific treatment will work with a certain type of tumor will allow clinicians to tailor therapy to the individual patient—hence the term precision medicine. Drs. Mochel and Allenspach-Jorn, both veterinarians, revel in the fact that the knowledge gleaned from such studies can be used to help dogs and people.
