02663: Comparative Brain Tumor Consortium (CBTC) Meningioma Pathology Board

One Health: Yes

Abstract

Meningioma is the most common intracranial neoplasm in the dog representing up to 50% of all primary intracranial neoplasms. Dogs can suffer significant clinical signs and impact on quality of life depending on size, location, and degree of invasiveness of the tumor. Treatment typically consists of surgical excision, if the mass is accessible, followed by radiation and/or chemotherapeutics. Unfortunately, while surgical advances have been made for this tumor type, correlative data describing the gross and histopathologic findings with the dog’s post-surgical outcome has remained elusive and is in its infancy. Therefore, an unmet need exists for developing a standardized set of pathologic criteria that can be correlated with surgical outcome and be used to guide prognosis, therapeutic intervention, and identify novel biomarkers that will aid in both diagnosis and treatment efficacy. The Comparative Brain Tumor Consortium (CBTC) meningioma pathology board represents a collaboration of diagnostic and investigative experts with diagnostic, scientific, and clinical experience in canine and human meningiomas. For this project, expertise provided by veterinary and physician neuropathologists will be complemented by the prospective integration of clinical outcome data and molecular profiling analyses. This integrated platform will identify prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers for canine patients and will generate uniformity in diagnosis across institutions. A grading and classification scheme will also be developed for canine meningioma to help define prognostic outcome and prospectively integrate tumor morphology, immune cell infiltrate, and epigenetic profiles with genomic data obtained from a robust collection of canine tumors. This level of tumor characterization will allow specific parallels to be drawn between subsets of canine and human tumor subtypes, thus fostering comparative translational clinical trials to benefit both species. 

Publication(s)

Why Dogs Now Play a Big Role in Human Cancer Research. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2019, from WIRED website: https://www.wired.com/story/why-dogs-now-play-a-big-role-in-human-cancer-research/

Amin, S. B., Anderson, K. J., Boudreau, C. E., Martinez-Ledesma, E., Kocakavuk, E., Johnson, K. C., Barthel, F. P., Varn, F. S., Kassab, C., Ling, X., Kim, H., Barter, M., Lau, C. C., Ngan, C. Y., Chapman, M., Koehler, J. W., Long, J. P., Miller, A. D., Miller, C. R., … Verhaak, R. G. W. (2020). Comparative Molecular Life History of Spontaneous Canine and Human Gliomas. Cancer Cell , 37(2), 243-257.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2020.01.004