Bentley's Legacy Continues

My personal and professional association with the University of Pennsylvania Vet School began in 2002 when our collie, Bentley, was diagnosed with lymphoma. We decided to treat him at Penn and I began a 22 week adventure that culminated in the article Saving Bentley (to which there is a link on the right side of this blog). It actually took me a long time to write the article after Bentley died and it wasn't published about a year after he died. Some time after that, my new found friends at the vet school called me up to see if I was interested in writing a follow up book about pets with cancer. You see, they had received over $250,000 in unsolicited contributions for cancer research based on my story.

I tell you this because this is where I was when the Barbaro adventure began: hanging out at the vet school, taking my courses and trying to piece together a narrative book about the amazing things that were happening in oncology at Penn vet.

One of those amazing things made ABC news last week. Kyra, a ten year old Rhodesian Ridgeback dog is a three year lymphoma survivor, due to a vaccine she received in a breakthrough study conducted by canine and human oncologists at Penn. Over 4 million dogs are diagnosed with cancer each year (more than humans, by the way) and because of their shorter life span, doctors are able to study both the progression of the disease and treatment options more quickly in dogs than in humans. So Kyra and a number of dogs enrolled in the trial study of a lymphoma vaccine are literally paving the way for humans and living to tell the tale.

It is an astounding breakthrough and one that radiation oncologist, Dr. Lili Duda, had been hoping for since way back when I interviewed her. She always thought that we shouldn't be injecting lab mice with human diseases but rather studying those that occur naturally in animals, cancer being the primary one. It's a concept that appeases the animal welfare activist in all of us and has the potential to save lives. Who can argue with logic that seems to work?

So Bravo to Penn for pushing the boundaries. Gratitude to those owners who were willing to enroll their pets in the study and just a tiny twinge of regret that Bentley couldn't have benefited from the research.