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College of Veterinary Medicine

For Human Cancer Research, cats’ Tumors are less useful than dogs’

May 4, 2018

Newsweek – It’s nothing personal, cat people. But feline tumors aren’t used nearly as often as those in dogs to study human cancer, Purdue University’s Dr. Christopher Fulkerson says.

Cats tend to have a type of skin cancer in their heads and mouths that some researchers are using as a model for human head and neck cancers. But dogs seem to be diagnosed more frequently with tumors that overlap with human cancer, Fulkerson explains. “It’s been a little bit easier to find diseases that really match up,” he says. Basically, scientists could put a cat’s tumor in a mouse used for human cancer research, but why would drug companies focused on human cancer want them?

Read Article: http://www.newsweek.com/2018/05/04/fur-what-its-worth-why-cats-tumors-arent-so-useful-human-cancer-research-902246.html

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