Jyotika Varshney, Milch C. Scott, David A. Largaespada, and Subbaya Subramanian
Osteosarcoma is an aggressive primary bone tumor in humans and is among the most common cancer afflicting dogs. Despite surgical advancements and intensification of chemo- and targeted therapies, the survival outcome for osteosarcoma patients is, as of yet, suboptimal. The presence of metastatic disease at diagnosis or its recurrence after initial therapy is a major factor for the poor outcomes. It is thought that most human and canine patients have at least microscopic metastatic lesions at diagnosis. Osteosarcoma in dogs occurs naturally with greater frequency and shares many biological and clinical similarities with osteosarcoma in humans. From a genetic perspective, osteosarcoma in both humans and dogs is characterized by complex karyotypes with highly variable structural and numerical chromosomal aberrations. Similar molecular abnormalities have been observed in human and canine osteosarcoma… It remains possible that recurrent aberrant gene expression changes due to gene amplification or epigenetic* alterations could be uncovered and these could be used for developing new, targeted therapies. However, the remarkably high genomic complexity of osteosarcoma has precluded their definitive identification… The proposition of this review is that careful comparative genomic studies between human, canine and mouse models of osteosarcoma may help identify commonly affected and targetable pathways for alternative therapies for osteosarcoma patients. Translational research may be found through a path that begins in mouse models, and then moves through canine patients, and then human patients.
Varshney, J.; Scott, M.C.; Largaespada, D.A.; Subramanian, S. Understanding the Osteosarcoma Pathobiology: A Comparative Oncology Approach. Vet. Sci. 2016, 3, 3.
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*Epigenetic: Something that affects a cell, organ or individual without directly affecting its DNA. An epigenetic change may indirectly influence the expression of the genome.
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