Great article! A related thought occured to me after I read the ‘Death Of Cancer’ by Vince DeVita. One reason the NCI program was successful is because the NCI operated a research hospital; the hospital was free for the patients in exchange for their participation in clinical research programs. Physician-scientists developed protocols, including combination chemotherapy, while basically experimenting on patients in ways that would not be allowed today. With our current regulations, its inconceivable that combination chemotherapy could’ve been developed.
My takeaway from that was that perhaps we could re-create a similar institution, but for dogs, as a circumvention measure [I continue to think that the best animal disease model for humans are humans]. The failure mode of such a research program would of course be that treatments are developed in a very targeted manner for dogs that doesn’t translate to human cancers.
A pan cancer research program that experiments on dogs on the other could be more promising in that the learnings would translate to humans much more readily.
Great article! A related thought occured to me after I read the ‘Death Of Cancer’ by Vince DeVita. One reason the NCI program was successful is because the NCI operated a research hospital; the hospital was free for the patients in exchange for their participation in clinical research programs. Physician-scientists developed protocols, including combination chemotherapy, while basically experimenting on patients in ways that would not be allowed today. With our current regulations, its inconceivable that combination chemotherapy could’ve been developed.
My takeaway from that was that perhaps we could re-create a similar institution, but for dogs, as a circumvention measure [I continue to think that the best animal disease model for humans are humans]. The failure mode of such a research program would of course be that treatments are developed in a very targeted manner for dogs that doesn’t translate to human cancers.
A pan cancer research program that experiments on dogs on the other could be more promising in that the learnings would translate to humans much more readily.