03368: Liquid Biopsy for Early Relapse Detection and Improved Treatment of Canine Mast Cell Tumors
Grant Status: Open
Abstract
Mast cell tumor (MCT) is the most common malignant canine skin tumor, accounting
for 16-21% of all skin tumors. Clinical management decisions are difficult because of the
challenging biological behavior of some MCTs and the inaccuracy of predictive and prognostic
biomarkers or other molecular descriptors (i.e., c-KIT staining pattern and mutation status, KI-67,
AgNOr). While surgery is the mainstay of managing canine MCTs, toceranib phosphate (Palladia)
showed clinical benefits for MCTs requiring chemotherapy. However, most tumors will develop
acquired resistance within months of starting this treatment. Currently, there are no means to identify treatment resistance apart from clinical characteristics such as relapse rate, which describes when the disease is already spread. In addition, most procedures used for monitoring patients with MCT require sedation or general anesthesia.
Early disease progression detection by quantifying minimal residual disease is thus an
unmet clinical need. The development of such a test could significantly affect disease
management, improve patient outcomes, and help identify new treatment strategies. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) based liquid biopsy can measure tumor burden and minimal residual disease in a minimally invasive way, such as blood sampling, utilizing different tumor-related biomarkers. Although liquid biopsy has been proposed for screening and initial results for monitoring have been published,
the clinical utility of liquid biopsy for canine MCTs has yet to be established. The proposed study
would open a critical new area of monitoring MCT patients and could significantly improve their
quality of life and significantly impact veterinary oncology.
Publication(s)
None at this time
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