From: Laboratory Equipment
Veterinary Oncology was first recognized as a specialty within veterinary medicine in the US close to 50 years ago. The Veterinary Cancer Society (VCS) was founded in 1976 as a professional organization dedicated specifically to veterinary oncology. The American College of Internal Veterinary Medicine (ACVIM) was founded as an umbrella group for specialties within veterinary medicine in 1973, and Medical Oncology was added as a specialty in 1988. In Europe, the European Society of Veterinary Oncology (ESVONC) was founded in 1982, and oncology was added to the European College of Veterinary Medicine – Companion Animals (ECVIM-CA) in 2009. Two additional leading veterinary oncology societies are the Associação Brasileira de Oncologia Veterinária (Arbrovet), founded in Brazil in 2004, and the Japan Veterinary Cancer Society (JVCS), founded in 2009.
The earliest work in veterinary oncology dates from the mid- to late-1960’s, with work in the US and Europe on tumors in animals beginning to appear in the literature. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, regimens for bone marrow transplants in dogs were developed, and the mid-1970’s saw development of vaccines for canine lymphoma.
The World Health Organization (WHO) first published the International Histological Classification of Tumors of Domestic Animals in 1974, followed in 1980 by the TNM Classification of Tumors in Domestic Animals, significant for showing that spontaneous canine and feline tumors are relevant models to study human cancers.
Early studies of immunotherapy regimens in the mid-1980’s showed promise for treatment of canine melanoma, leading to DNA vaccine evaluations in the mid-2000’s that assessed the potential for translation to human patients.
The National Cancer Institute started its Comparative Oncology Program (COP) in 2003, which led to the establishment of the Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium (COTC), a network of 20 academic comparative oncology centers which conducts clinical trials of new therapies in dogs with cancer that may directly or indirectly lead to further development of these therapies for use in human cancer patients. Tumor tissue biobanks provide data and/or tissue for comparative purposes, or to identify genotypes of interest. The Canine Comparative Oncology and Genomics Consortium (CCOGC) and the Pfizer-CCOGC Biospecimen Repository, created in 2012, provides a range of sample types and data for over 2,000 canine patients.
