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THE BAJA POST
NEWSROOM
SOURCE: PR NEWSMEDIA
Calviri, a biotech company developing off-the-shelf therapeutic and preventative cancer vaccines for dogs and people, has announced the launch of an investigational trial aimed at treating dogs with early-stage hemangiosarcoma.
The Scout Out Canine Hemangiosarcoma study, or SOCH, seeks to determine if Calviri’s pre-made vaccine can extend the life of dogs with stage 1 or stage 2 tumors when combined with standard care therapy which includes surgery and chemotherapy.
HSA is rare in humans but common in dogs, especially in golden retrievers. The cancer originates in the spleen and can spread to other sites. It is typically detected at later stages, but even when identified early, the life expectancy is between 5 and 11 months. The standard treatment involves surgically removing the tumorous spleen and administering chemotherapy.
While personalized cancer vaccines are showing promise for people when used with checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy (e.g., Keytruda), those vaccines, which are tailored to individual mutations in tumor DNA, may be impractical to build and be prohibitively expensive for use in dogs.
Calviri has identified a different source of neoantigens created from tumor RNA variants. These RNA-error derived neoantigens are shared across patients and tumor types, allowing Calviri to design off-the-shelf vaccines for treating tumors. A recent clinical trial tested a preventative cancer vaccine made from similarly identified neoantigens in dogs.
Typically, cancer vaccines are used to treat later-stage tumors in both humans and dogs. The SOCH trial will be the first to focus on early-stage tumors, with the hope that treating tumors when they are smaller and less advanced will result in significantly higher survival rates.
