Considering treatment options for canine osteosarcoma

Treatment of canine osteosarcoma is advancing with recently released data showing enhanced outcomes for patients with a combination of chemotherapy and ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy (ECI). In a dvm360 interview at the 2025 American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) Forum in Louisville, Kentucky, Jeffrey N Bryan, DVM, PhD, MS, DACVIM, professor of oncology and associate director of the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri and principal investigator for the pilot trial for ECI, discussed current treatment options for bone cancer in dogs and how science and technology are providing new avenues of care, such as ECI.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

Jeffrey N Bryan, DVM, PhD, MS, DACVIM: Osteosarcoma is a primary cancer of bone, and unlike most cancers that are not terribly painful, it is extremely painful. So the patients that come to us, we talk about having problems of life and limb and the limb part really is pain and severe life limiting discomfort. So removal of that tumor, either by surgery on the tumor itself, or amputation or using radiation to control it, becomes primary in managing the limb part of it. However, the majority of these patients, when they present, will already have microscopic spread of their tumor elsewhere in their body, particularly to their lungs, and that is what really limits their survival, their life.

If we only amputate dogs, half of them will be gone in the first few months after amputation, which is a terrible outcome, and the rest of them will almost certainly be gone long before a year happens if we add chemotherapy to amputation, they live two to three times longer than if they have amputation alone, based on the published literature. And so now, adding a dose of chemotherapy while we wait to start the immunotherapy, and having survivals that are well out over a year in this group of dogs, as well as more than half of them being alive at the 1 year mark, appears to be a very substantial advance forward. The fact that this is a well-tolerated treatment that invokes the dog's own immune system to try to control the disease long term is a substantial advancement over what we have had in the past to treat these patients.