Michael Rollins, Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, May 13, 2008
SEATTLE -- Washington State University plans to start offering bone marrow tranplants for dogs with cancer. They won't be cheap, with cost at upwards of $20,000.
The bone marrow or stem cell transplant -- a procedure that every year saves tens of thousands of human lives and won for the Seattle physician who pioneered it the 1990 Nobel Prize in medicine -- appears poised to come full circle and become more widely available to those who first made it all possible.
"They helped us figure out how to help save ourselves, so this represents a big give-back to the canine species," said Dr. Jeffrey Bryan, a veterinary oncologist at WSU.
Bryan is spearheading a project to soon launch what would be the world's first large-scale clinical transplant program for dogs. The program is expected to become available to treat dogs with lymphoma this summer.
Bone marrow transplants had been done experimentally in dogs over the decades, Bryan said, and clinically for a few dogs by some pioneering private-practice veterinarians. However, the procedure has never before been routinely offered as a cancer therapy for the canine community, he said.
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