Dr. Charles Maitz, a veterinary radiation oncologist at the University of Missouri, has been doing research lately that focuses on thyroid cancer in dogs and how to best determine the dose of radiopharmaceutical drugs, essentially a radioactive treatment, needed to treat it.
I recently sat down with Dr. Maitz to discuss how research and clinical trials in dogs can help the dogs while also advancing human medicine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rebecca Smith: How common is thyroid cancer in dogs and, more generally, just cancer in dogs?
Dr. Charles Maitz: Caner in general is common. Unfortunately, in our pets, about half of pet dogs will develop cancer at some point in their life.
Thankfully, many of those are manageable – they get a lot of skin tumors that some can be cured just by removing them, which is great, but not all of them.
They get a lot of tumors that are really similar to the tumor types that we get as people. So, dogs can develop lymphoma, head and neck cancer, bone tumors, all those things.
So, unfortunately, it's more common than we like, but they live the same lives we do, and so they have some of those same risks of longevity that we do.
In terms of thyroid cancer, we say here at Missouri – because we have all the tools in the toolkit to treat thyroid cancer – that our trainees and students and residents get to the point where they think that thyroid cancer is a common occurrence because we see one or two cases a week.
In reality, it's only maybe 1% to 4% of tumors that dogs develop are thyroid tumors. So, it's not real common. It's pretty rare.
Rebecca Smith: So, how can your research be used, not only to help animals, but potentially to help humans down the line?
Dr. Charles Maitz: The goal of this research is to better develop tools to determine those doses, so that as other researchers on campus develop new radiopharmaceutical drugs – the goal, as we discuss these collaborations, is for them to work with MURR [Missouri University Research Reactor] to develop these new drugs.
And they will evaluate a lot of that pre-clinical work as they're developing those drugs, identifying the best candidates.
The next step would be to move those into veterinary clinical trials, as we develop a pathway towards making smarter, more likely to succeed human clinical trials.
"[Dogs] get a lot of tumors that are really similar to the tumor types that we get as people. So, dogs can develop lymphoma, head and neck cancer, bone tumors, all those things."Dr. Charles Maitz
And so, ultimately, we see that as kind of a big pipeline that all can happen on MU’s campus of these drugs being developed at MURR., coming through the College of Veterinary Medicine and Veterinary Health Center as we develop those phase one trials for people, and, along the way – the beautiful thing about that is, along the way, we get to help dogs, too.
Rebecca Smith: I was gonna say it's kind of cyclical. The dogs are helping the humans, but also, as we develop more understanding on the human side, it helps the dogs.
Charlie Maitz: Exactly, and that's one of the things I love about clinical trials and veterinary medicine – is we're not doing the things which are completely experimental, right?
We are saying this disease in dogs is very similar, and we think that in your path towards getting FDA approval for this – we know that you need to look in other species, you've shown that this is safe in dogs already – we think that it also has a reasonable chance of having efficacy.
And so, we can give patients that have sometimes cancers that we don't have great treatment options for. Thankfully, that's not the case in thyroid, but other tumor types, it is.
We can give them treatment options, and we can do it, you know, in a way that helps those patients and also helps us build the science around that and ultimately help people.
