Cats as real-world cancer models

26:27about a new science paper out in science that suggests that cats may be one of the best real-world models for human cancer and studying human cancer. Um it sounds a bit weird, but when you think about it, at the end of the day, um it's all about animal models. And we talk about this a lot on the podcast. The fact that, you know, when we do biomedical research, a lot of times we're looking for a model of a certain disease or a certain ailment, and we want to replicate that in some kind of you know, animal that we study. That we can study in great detail. A lot of time that has to do with rodents, right? Rodents are the bread and butter of a lot of biomedical

27:08labs. But, rodents don't get cancer the same way that humans do. Because they're not exposed naturally to the kind of carcinogens that humans are in day-to-day life. So, you have to induce cancer. You have to give them genetic mutations. Now, that obviously has a lot of benefits, and there's a lot of incredible cancer research that goes on there. But, there's parts that are missing. It turns out domesticated cats live with human beings and are exposed to the same type of carcinogens that we are as human beings. And so, the types of cancer that cats get, domesticated cats, are very similar to the types of cancers

27:51that humans get. And so, if we can study how domesticated cats get cancer, their genomes, their oncogenomes is what we should say, because this this is specific to the genomics represented in the tumors, in the cancer tumors. Those are going to have all these different types of mutations that cause the cancer. Um if we can study that, that can then supplement a lot of the other research that's happening with cancer. And that is what this particular paper is doing. The paper was published in Science, called the oncogenome of the domesticated cat. Um it's from a bunch of collabora- collaborators, the University of Bern, from Cornell, from the Ontario vet vet

28:33veterinary college, and from the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The researchers effectively sequenced about four 500 500 cat tumor and normal tissue pairs. So, you get, you know, the tissue from the tumor and you got the tissue from the normal part of the cat and so then you can compare what the mutations were. It's very similar to that story that we did of the guy in Australia who built a mRNA vaccine for the his dog's cancer. This he did the same thing, right? He sequenced the normal genome and the genome of the tumor to find out how to target that tumor. In this case it's 500 pairs of of um

29:16genomes from 13 different tumor types. It's the first large-scale genomic atlas of cancer in domesticated cats. Obviously this helps cats and vets understand how cats get cancer. But what what I really like about this is this idea of the one medicine or one health approach. That's the big idea. It's the fact that veterinary medicine and human medicine should not be treated as completely separate siloed parts of medicine. Because cancer at the end of the day, if you look at a big picture, right? Cancer is a genomic disease. It has to do with mutations in

29:57the genome. And if we can study multiple species that get similar types of cancer, then we can study invariants that are unique to the cancer and the idea, the physics of cancer, let's say, from that first principle and it has nothing to do with where the cancer is happening, whether it's in a cat or if it's in a human, right? It's a fundamental first principles understanding of what the cancer is doing. So they've they've identified 31 driver genes and these are genes that drive cancer mutations later on. Okay, so you can have a gene that has a

30:37mutation and then that drives other types of mutations, right? So that's what's called a driver gene. They identified 31 driver genes. There was this particular gene called TP53, and that one was the most frequently mutated gene showing up in about 33% of cat tumors. Um and that's a gene that's also