This two-day workshop is an educational program by NCI/NIH. The theme is Animal Models for Cancer Prevention research.
The NCI funds many groups of researchers. Usually, researchers working on a specific subject belong to a few study sections, and they are enclosed in the group. But sometimes the NCI program directors attempt to bring those researchers together in different combinations, offering chance to interact with researchers in related but different fields. Interesting, is it not.
For cancer prevention, knowing mechanism of cancer development, and modeling the process in animals, are essential to develop methods (drug, vaccine, etc) to prevent cancer.
Cancers in different organs are considered different diseases. Cancer in pancreas may be driven by different mechanisms or by different set of genes from cancer in colon. So we need to build models for each cancer.
As such, scientists need different animal models for different cancers and work on different prevention strategies.
Usually, primary study model animals are rodents (mice, rats). With many advantages as a model for research purpose, they are the first choice for developing disease model.
Investigational New Drug (IND) application is a major milestone for drug developers. For startup biotech or pharma companies, whether they can take their drug candidate to IND or not is a determinant of the company's fate or impacting factor on the stock price. Yet, IND is not a magical entity. IND application is basically paperwork and datasets submitted to the government. Companies need to have specific knowledge to file the IND paperwork and compelling datasets proving the efficacy of their drug.
The FDA requires two models for IND filing. Hence, they need rodent model and another animal model (dog, cat, pig, etc). With various reasons, primates are fading out overall as a research model. The government and scientists are searching for models with good clinical translation relevance and feasibility. Cost is a factor, too. Non-rodent models are far more expensive.
This workshop covered latest results from cancer model mice, as well as non-rodent animal cancer models.
I was not very familiar with non-rodent cancer models. The workshop was a good learning opportunity. There were talks on dog and pig models.
For example, I had no idea veterinarian scientists are running trial for cancer vaccine on dogs. For the trial, about 800 dogs were enrolled with owners' consent, and 400 dogs received the vaccine, the rest received placebo. The trial is assessing if the dogs develop cancers and the vaccine reduce the development. Early assessment did not look very promising, and they encountered some unexpected findings (many cancers found in both groups) apparently. But these stories are at least amusing to me.
The workshop was fun to attend. Online format is a huge plus for convenience.
