Key points:
- Heart tissue from dogs is an excellent alternative to test chemo’s toxicity and side effects.
- A new platform created the test the dog tissue yields more clinically relevant drug screens than mouse models.
- The research team is hoping to make more strides in the emerging field of translational cardio-oncology.
Screening cancer drugs for cardiotoxicity in the lab is a challenge since heart cells don’t naturally grow in a dish, requiring researchers to use the cardiac tissue from rodent models to do important testing. Now, researchers at Tufts University have found an unexpected alternative—from man’s best friend.
In a new study published in PLOS ONE, researchers have shown that heart tissue obtained through organ donations from dogs dying of other causes are a promising platform for testing cancer drug toxicity.
The organ donation program works the same as in people, with owners agreeing to donate their pets’ heart when they die to support research in animal and human health.
For the study, the research team exposed canine heart slices to doxorubicin, a chemotherapy drug for both humans and dogs that is used to suppress a range of solid tumors—but is also known to cause life-threatening heart problems. The heart cells did not recover from the injuries caused by the drug, validating findings from previous rodent studies.
However, according to the study, the canine heart slices stayed alive for over a week, lasting more than twice as long as heart cells taken from rodent models. Since dogs are genetically similar to humans, the researchers say the platform yields quicker, more comprehensive, and more clinically relevant drug screens than standard mouse models.
“We still don’t know why our platform works so well, but maybe we aren’t giving heart tissue enough credit,” said senior author Vicky Yang, a cardiologist and associate professor at Tufts. “Maybe heart tissue is more resilient than we think.”
It took over two years of trial and error before Yang and colleagues finalized their platform. Translational cardio-oncology is an emerging field, and the researchers are eager to collaborate with other clinicians to test a wider range of cancer drugs.