Heather Gardner: Osteosarcoma is relentless. The cancer chews away at the bone, which becomes very painful and must be surgically removed, usually via amputation in pets. Osteosarcoma also has a very high chance of spreading to other parts of the body, particularly the lungs. When osteosarcoma spreads to the other parts of the body, it is typically very resistant to all treatments in both humans and dogs.

Progress against osteosarcoma has been slow in part because the disease is hard to study at nearly every level. Fewer than 1,000 children, teenagers, and young adults in the United States are diagnosed each year, limiting the number of patients for clinical trials. The tumors themselves are genetically complex, making their underlying biology harder to untangle. And research efforts historically have been scattered across institutions, each working with limited data and resources.

Cheryl London: Scale and coordination matter when it comes to making breakthroughs for rare cancers and other diseases. This collaboration will be the largest unified effort to study osteosarcoma ever. It’s designed to eliminate the major barriers faced by scientists trying to answer big questions, from dedicated funding to real-time data sharing.

Because we are conducting our research in tandem, it’s not incremental science as usual. Across the eight institutions on our team, we have broad and complementary expertise in preclinical models, computational biology, tumor evolution, clinical trial design, and the analysis of blood, tissue, and tumor samples to find patterns. Each research unit will be continually sharing data and samples while learning from others on our team. This will allow us to more rapidly test, refine, and feed new insights into the design of more targeted treatments.

Gardner: Osteosarcoma is much more common in pet dogs than in people. More than 25,000 cases are diagnosed in the United States every year, and veterinarians use largely the same surgical approaches and chemotherapy that are the standard of care in human medicine.

The cancer in pet dogs is very similar to the disease seen in children. It shows up in the bone and spreads to the lungs in the same way; once it is visible in the lungs, it tends to be resistant to all forms of therapy.  And if you look at the different types of genetic mutations present in canine and human osteosarcoma, they look very similar. So, we can learn a lot from the disease these pets develop naturally—and work together as a team to find better answers for both people and dogs.

Gardner: The immune system is really important to how cancer progresses and how it develops resistance to different therapies, but it is hard to replicate in existing preclinical mouse models. The pet dogs enrolled in clinical trials have intact immune systems, just like people do.

Another reason dogs are so valuable to learning about osteosarcoma is that, sadly, the course of this cancer in pets is much more rapid than in people, often fatal within one to two years. In human medicine, a large percentage of osteosarcoma patients are cured with initial treatment, but some patients develop metastatic disease very early on and others develop metastatic disease years later.  

As our canine patients likely will not be cured by current treatments, we have good reason to try new therapies upfront in pets that we wouldn’t try yet in people. We also can see how our canine patients respond to new therapies over a much shorter time span and then apply what we learn for the benefit of both species.

London: At Tufts, the team is drawing upon our deep experience in clinical trial design and implementation and Dr. Gardner’s expertise in advanced genomics—including liquid-biopsy approaches that analyze circulating tumor DNA and immune responses from blood samples to either show or predict response to treatment. The school’s strong clinical trials infrastructure supports robust enrollment, while its cutting-edge genomics and pathology resources enable researchers to link biological data directly to patient outcomes.

Initially, we will offer several clinical trials for pet dogs with osteosarcoma—likely four to six—over the first four years of this initiative, with the flexibility to expand, refine, or pivot as new insights emerge from laboratory, genomic, or preclinical studies across the collaborative. By tightly linking lab discoveries to real-world trials, we hope to accelerate progress toward hopefully bringing new treatments to people affected by osteosarcoma.

London: Osteosarcoma is a “noisy” disease, with many genomic changes occurring at once, making it difficult to identify which ones actually drive the cancer. Collecting and integrating data about the genomics and outcomes associated with this cancer across species could eliminate a lot of that noise and answer important questions that allow us to identify the key genetic changes that help drive osteosarcoma development and progression. 

This information can then be used to design treatment strategies that are more patient-specific based on the tumor genetics and, therefore, more likely to be effective. Ultimately, our goal is to cure more people and dogs of this devastating disease.