Combined Cryotherapy and Immunotherapy for Treatment of Canine Osteosarcoma
Mentor: Brian Ladle
Bone cancer remains a significant challenge to treat and cure. It is a disease that predominantly affects adolescents and young adults with little progress in treatments being made over the past 30 years. We imagine an ideal cancer therapy as one that would both effectively treat a targeted tumor and provide effective systemic protection against distant disease spread or disease recurrence. Image-guided cryotherapy (freezing the tumor) has a significant history of meeting the first goal of providing effective local control when surgical approaches are not feasible in multiple tumor types. The subsequent interaction of the immune system with the frozen tumor has long been hoped to potentially accomplish the second goal of preventing and/or treating distant spread by generating a potent anti-tumor immune response. We have not yet fully harnessed the immune-stimulatory aspects of cryotherapy. We will be studying the combination of MRI-guided cryotherapy with direct tumor injection of a novel immune stimulant called a STING agonist that will enable the frozen tumor to serve as a potent vaccine. We will test if this approach generates a significant immune response to the tumor and potentially prevents disease recurrence and improves outcomes of overall survival. We are testing this innovative treatment strategy in a clinical trial for pet dogs with osteosarcoma (OSA). The standard of care treatment for canine OSA is amputation followed by 4 doses of chemotherapy. We are testing the efficacy of our experimental therapy, cryotherapy, and STING agonist injection prior to amputation versus the standard of care therapy. Ms. Kulp’s project for the summer will be to assist with the analysis of the immune response in the tumor tissues that we acquire after the osteosarcoma tumor has been amputated.
