Saturday, May 23, 2009

Woof

There are a ton of recent articles that have come out lately on new and developing treatments for NHL, and paticularly for follicular NHL, and a few more that review and update what we know about current treatments. I'm still trying to read through them all. Once I do, I'll provide some links and summaries. There's a major conference on cancer research in the next week or two, so that's probably where a lot of this stuff is coming from.

For now, here's a fascinating article on how some researchers are studying lymphoma in dogs to better understand how lymphoma works in humans. It's from Medical News Today, and it's called "Collaboration Between NC State And UNC Lineberger To Combat Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma In Human And Canine Patients."

Pretty interesting. Right now, when researchers want to study a lymphoma treatment, they first try it out on mice. (This isn't only the case for lymphoma, but for many cancers.) It's been successful so far, but researchers are discovering that dog lymphoma is not only very common, but genetically similar to human lymphoma. So canine oncologists and human oncologists are teaming up and comparing notes. (By "canine oncologists" I mean those who study cancer in dogs, not those who are dogs. You probably knew that.) Dogs are more genetically complex than mice, and closer to humans, so they make a better model than mice.

Strudel is looking over my shoulder, begging to add some commentary, so to stop her from digging her nails into me any more, I'm going to let her add soemthing.

Surprising? No. Once again, dogs come to the rescue. You would be lost without us. And I'm not even talking about little Timmy and Lassie. I think "canine oncologists" shoud mean dogs who are oncologists. Then we'd see some breakthroughs. Talk about celebrations. We'd see some leg-humping that ni

OK, we're good.

More on all that great research soon.

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