What makes a patient a good ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy candidate?
Craig Clifford, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology) and Christine Mullin, VMD, DACVIM (Oncology) discuss the logistics and implications of immunotherapy treatments for canine oncology patients.
In this dvm360 interview, oncology specialists Craig Clifford, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology), and Christine Mullin, VMD, DACVIM (Oncology), explain which patients are ideal candidates for ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy (ECI), a newly released product. Approved in March 2025 for the treatment of canine osteosarcoma, ECI is the first autologous prescription therapy to receive FDA approval for this type of cancer.
RELATED: USDA approves new canine cancer therapy
Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity:
Craig Clifford, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology): Part of it will depend upon the owner’s ability to be present for all of those time periods. Geography matters—are you near one of the treatment centers? Because if you’re not, then the owner is clearly going to have to make a big drive, maybe even stay at a hotel for the entire course. So the logistics of that can be challenging.
I also think about whether the owner is looking to follow standard of care, or if they want to pursue this instead, or even consider a combination. We know that in human oncology, immunotherapy is often combined with another immunotherapy or paired with a standard therapy, like radiation or chemotherapy, which really helps us get another step ahead. It may be that we start to explore those same kinds of combinations in veterinary patients as well.
Christine Mullin, VMD, DACVIM (Oncology): And ELIAS is doing just that. There are two clinical trials ongoing right now that combine different immune therapies to see how far we can push the immune system to attack—and really thinking about attacking these cancers from multiple angles. If you just keep doing the same thing over and over against a cancer, it’s going to mutate and evade very quickly—especially with the tough cancers we’re targeting, like melanoma, osteosarcoma, and hemangiosarcoma. So we’re excited to see what comes out of those studies. Certainly, immunotherapy is the most exciting, inspiring facet of therapy right now for us and on the human side as well.
Craig Clifford, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology): Yes, that’s one of the new pillars of oncology.
