It's a big 'give-back' to dogs for cancer help

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The bone marrow, or stem cell, transplant, a procedure that every year saves tens of thousands of lives and won for the Seattle physician who pioneered it the 1990 Nobel Prize in Medicine, appears poised to come full circle and finally become more widely available to those who first made it all possible.

Dogs.

"They helped us figure out how to help save ourselves, and so this represents a big give-back to the canine species," said Dr. Jeffrey Bryan, a veterinary oncologist at Washington State University.

Bryan is spearheading a project to soon launch what would be the world's first large-scale clinical transplant program for dogs. The program is expected to become available to treat dogs with lymphoma sometime this summer.

Bone marrow transplants had been done experimentally in dogs over the decades, Bryan said, and clinically for a few dogs by some pioneering private practice veterinarians. But the procedure has never before been routinely offered as a cancer therapy for the canine community, he said.

"We are looking at this as an option for dealing with one of the most common cancers in dogs," Bryan said. "There are tens of thousands of dogs diagnosed with lymphoma every year. At WSU, we get five or six calls a week."

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