October 2011

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine have developed an experimental cell-based vaccine that is showing an increase in survival times for dogs with spontaneous non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The research team gave the experimental vaccine to dogs with newly diagnosed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after the dogs had received the standard treatment of chemotherapy and had been confirmed in remission. The vaccine was given to each dog in three doses, three weeks apart. The researchers then tracked the dogs over several years to see whether the vaccine would prevent relapse or prolong survival in the event of relapse.

The results, as explained by Nicola Mason, an assistant professor of medicine at Penn Vet and one of researchers on this study, are promising. Mason states, "Though vaccinated and unvaccinated dogs relapsed with clinical disease at the same time, 40 percent of vaccinated dogs that relapsed experienced long-term survival after a second round of chemotherapy; only 7 percent of unvaccinated dogs that relapsed and were treated with the same rescue chemotherapy protocol survived long term." Mason also added that "These dogs just received three doses of vaccine, three weeks apart. If we kept boosting the immune system in this way by vaccination, perhaps the dogs would not relapse in the first place.”