School of Veterinary Medicine professor Nicola Mason conducted a pilot study vaccinating dogs diagnosed with bone cancer in order to delay the onset of metastatic disease.
The therapeutic vaccine targets HER2, a protein expressed in breast cancer and osteosarcoma. After a listeria-based immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine delivered promising preclinical results, Mason used the opportunity to help her patients and accelerate testing in the human clinic.
The trial laid the foundation for the Comparative Immunotherapy Program — a program launched a year ago to tap into Penn’s “deep expertise” across schools in the immunotherapy field. The program is now enrolling canine patients in two adoptive cellular therapy clinical trials.
The goal is to “leverage a comparative approach to better understand the immunobiology of disease and accelerate the clinical translation of innovative immunotherapies into the human and veterinary clinic to improve health for humans and animals,” Mason said to Penn Today.
That initial clinical trial of a novel immunotherapy treatment — combining a molecule expressed by cancer cells with a modified live form of the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes — demonstrated a “powerful, targeted immune response” directed against osteosarcoma cells.
The trial is now featured in the documentary “Shelter Me: The Cancer Pioneers.”
Mason explained further how canine trials can inform human health research.
“Pet dogs develop diseases spontaneously in the same way humans do. ... We can use this parallel patient population to accelerate translation of therapeutic strategies into the clinic and to determine correlative biomarkers of response that can inform human clinical trials,” Mason said. “Dogs benefit, and humans benefit.”
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In collaboration with Penn Medicine’s Daniel Powell, Mason’s team is also administrating “armored” CAR-T cells to treat B cell lymphoma or leukemia and systemically learning more about their effects on the tumor microenvironment. This trial is currently enrolling patients.
A second trial — where two patients have been enrolled and supported by the National Cancer Institute — is evaluating genetically engineered invariant natural killer T cells expressing a CAR in dogs with metastatic osteosarcoma.
The team works with the Comparative Pathology Core and Penn investigators, such as Medical School pathology professor Leyuan Ma, to provide expertise from developing and using canine in vitro assays to clinical protocol design and trial execution.
Moreover, the program continues to grow beyond Penn, collaborating with Aimee Payne at Columbia University as well as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
