Founder CEO of LEAH Labs here. Our pilot studies in dogs with cancer are slated to start in April.
We're first focused on the unmet need for dogs and working to build the first companion animal health company founded on gene editing expertise. That said, our platform is also built with human medicine in mind, as dog and human cancers are quite analogous to one another. We envision using spontaneous cancers in pet dogs as pre-IND or IND-enabling models for novel human cell therapy development. Also, CAR-T in dogs is regulated by the USDA, not the FDA, which helps us do all of this quicker and significantly more cost-effective.
Just talked to somebody yesterday who had one of these vaccines made for their dog. It actually seemed incredibly affordable compared to other treatments, something like 500-2000 for the formation of the vax.
Tumor vaccines are not at all equivalent to CAR-T. CAR-T involves genetically reprogramming T cells with information encoding a specific signal to find cancer, recognize it like a lock and key, and then destroy it.
CAR-T > tumor vaccines in humans for blood malignancies, and we envision the same for dogs.
I know there are groups seeing some successes in solid tumors with tumor vaccines, however.
We're first focused on the unmet need for dogs and working to build the first companion animal health company founded on gene editing expertise. That said, our platform is also built with human medicine in mind, as dog and human cancers are quite analogous to one another. We envision using spontaneous cancers in pet dogs as pre-IND or IND-enabling models for novel human cell therapy development. Also, CAR-T in dogs is regulated by the USDA, not the FDA, which helps us do all of this quicker and significantly more cost-effective.
Happy to discuss what we're up to :)