Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
New combined vaccine and gene therapy after canine melanoma surgery
By Finocchiaro, Liliana M E et al.·Published in Gene therapy·2019·Unidad de Transferencia Gené·View original on PubMed →
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Original publication title: Combination of cytokine-enhanced vaccine and chemo-gene therapy as surgery adjuvant treatments for spontaneous canine melanoma.
- Species:
- dog
Plain-English summary
A group of dogs with spontaneous melanoma (a type of skin cancer) underwent surgery and received additional treatments to help control the disease. The treatments included a vaccine and a combination of gene therapies that were injected after surgery. Results showed that these additional treatments significantly increased the number of dogs that remained free of local and distant cancer spread compared to those who only had surgery. Overall, the dogs that received the combined treatments lived much longer and had a better quality of life, turning a deadly disease into a more manageable condition for many of them.
People also search for: dog melanoma treatment · canine cancer vaccine · surgery for dog skin cancer
Abstract
After 6 years of follow-up treating 364 canine melanoma patients, we present here results about the proof-of-concept, safety, and efficacy of a new surgery adjuvant combined gene therapy. The adjuvant treatment (AT) group was divided in three arms as follows: (i) complete surgery plus vaccine (CS-V), (ii) complete surgery plus combined treatment (CS-CT), and (iii) partial surgery plus combined treatment (PS-CT). Besides the genetic vaccines composed by tumor extracts and lipoplexes carrying human interleukin-2 and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor genes, the patients were subjected to combined treatment received in the post-surgical bed injections of lipid-complexed thymidine kinase suicide gene plus ganciclovir and canine interferon-β gene plus bleomycin. As compared with surgery-only treated controls (So), CS-CT and CS-V treatments significantly increased the fraction of local disease-free (from 20 to 89 and 74%) and distant metastases-free patients (M0: from 45 to 87 and 84%). Although less effective than CS arms, PS-CT arm demonstrated a significantly improved control of metastatic disease (M0: 80%) compared with So (M0: 44%). In addition, AT produced a significant 9.3- (CS-CT), 6.5- (CS-V), and 5.4-fold (PS-CT) increase of overall survival as compared with their respective So controls. In general terms, the AT changed a lethal disease into a chronic disease where 70% of CS-CT, 51% of CS-V, and 14% of PS-CT patients died of melanoma unrelated causes. These surgery adjuvant treatments delayed or prevented post-surgical recurrence and distant metastasis, and improved disease-free and overall survival while maintaining quality of life. These successful outcomes encourage assaying a similar scheme for human melanoma.
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Search related cases →Original publication on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30858538/