Naturally Occurring Canine Invasive Urinary Bladder Cancer: A Complementary Animal Model to Improve the Success Rate in Human Clinical Trials of New Cancer Drugs

Table 1

Similarities and differences in naturally occurring invasive urothelial carcinoma between dogs and humans.

---

Similarities between dogs and humans

 Physiological age of onset and clinical symptoms

 Pathologically high grade, heterogenous cancer

 Molecular subtypes (e.g., luminal, basal)

 Epigenetic features

 Shared molecular targets (e.g., EGFR, CDKN2B, PIK3CA, BRCA2, and NFkB)

 Local cancer invasion into the bladder wall

 Distant cancer metastases in ≥50% of subjects

 Response to chemotherapy (e.g., cisplatin, carboplatin, and vinblastine)

Differences between dogs and humans

 Sex differences (male : female ratio 2 : 1 in humans, 0.5 : 1 in dogs; although most dogs studied had been spayed or neutered)

 Tumor location in bladder (more often trigonal in dogs; more variable in humans)

 Dog tumors possess dog homologue of BRAF V600E mutation common in human melanoma (human InvUC has other variants in MAPK signaling)

---