According to New Research, Dogs Could Be the Missing Piece to Finding a Cure for Brain Cancer
There is no question that a beloved dog can help brighten anyone's day. Now, pups might be able to do more for humans than simply bring joy to their days. According to Medical News Today, a team of researchers from Maine believe that dogs can also help find cures for one of the most hard-to-solve diseases. Professor Roel Verhaak and the team of researchers at Jackson Laboratories were recently published in Cancer Cell, and their study examined whether or not canines with diffuse gliomas—rare forms of cancerous brain tumors—can help treat humans with the same condition.
Getty / Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derman
Previous research reported that full-grown canines and children develop this form of cancer at the same time, which prompted the idea that diffuse gliomas develop depending on the age of the brain. As part of this study, the researchers put this information to the test by analyzing 83 glioma samples from postmortem dogs in order to compare them to examinations of adults and children that have also passed away.
The team discovered that mutations occurred in the dog samples as well as in the adult and child samples. They also found that the cancerous glioma cells were seen more in children than in adults. This boosts the idea that dogs with gliomas develop the disease around the same time as children.
With the information gained from the study, the researchers believe that the methods used to cure dogs of the cancer can help better inform the treatments for humans living with gliomas. For example, testing immunotherapy is thought to be a beneficial way to treat canines that could also be tested on people to help cure the disease in humans in the long run.
