Successful injectable chemotherapy in dogs leads to human trials.

Successful injectable chemotherapy in dogs leads to human trials. A pet dog,Cody was declared cancer free just months after he received a revolutionary injectable cancer-fighting chemotherapy regimen in July that delivers a compound containing cisplatin directly into a tumor. Researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of Kansas Medical Center have created a new drug called Hylapat,they blended cisplatin, a platinum-containing anticancer medication with hyaluronan, a polymer that occurs naturally in the human body. The team used hyaluronan to create HylaPlat because it enables a non-destructive local injection and sticks well to cancer cells, allowing for an efficient uptake of cisplatin into the tumor cells. The compound molecule of hyaluronan and cisplatin is only 20 nanometers in size, after doing its work in the tumor, HylaPlat drains easily into the lymph nodes, delivering a high dose of chemotherapy to any cancer cells present there. In the initial clinical trial starting in 2012, seven large-breed dogs with small forms of oral cancer received what researchers determined to be a "good" formulation of the chemotherapy. They used pet dogs suffering with actual cancers as opposed to lab animals for a variety of reasons, one of which is the limits that model cancers pose for researchers. Lab cancers have to be grown carefully under strict conditions, while real-world cancers, are made much hardier, have ways to evade the body's immune system, and are made up of multiple kinds of different cells that make them hard to kill. In the trials,in 3 of the dogs the cancer disappeared while 2 showed remission signaling the success of drug and possibilities in human cases.