NIH is recruiting dogs to test a new type of promising cancer drugs called immunotherapy. Photo credit: MIT Technology Review

Written by: Emily Mullin

Novel cancer drugs that harness an individual’s own immune system to fight cancer are showing incredible promise in some patients, but researchers don’t fully understand why these immunotherapies work for some people and not others.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health say they need animal models that imitate the human immune system to study the effects of these drugs. This week an advisory committee at the National Cancer Institute at NIH said it will start a new program in 2017 to study experimental immunotherapies in dogs with cancer. The National Cancer Institute has been performing clinical trials in dogs since 2003 with other cancer therapies, but this is the first large-scale dog immunotherapy effort the institute is supporting. Read more.

Published by MIT Technology Review November 4, 2016