Prediction isn’t just about the disease; it’s also about treatment, because not all patients respond well to the same therapeutics. For instance, the treatment of blood cancers, the most common of canine cancers, can benefit from AI.

In general, chemotherapy is the most widely-used treatment option for canine blood cancers, but finding the right drugs for each patient can be a challenge for vets. A wait-and-see approach after drug administration to a patient’s body can be costly, time-consuming, and take a toll on the patient and the humans who love them.

AI can help veterinarians find the most effective drugs for each individual patient and exclude ineffective ones before treatment even begins, often called a “precision medicine” approach.

One application of AI for cancer precision medicine involves the analysis of various drug responses using “live” tumor cells from canine lymphoma patients.⁵ This approach, in which researchers use fine-needle aspirates of cancer cells from the affected lymph nodes, uses AI to combine molecular, cellular, and clinical information in order to predict which anti-cancer drugs will work best for a specific dog’s particular lymphoma or leukemia.

Researchers tested and analyzed the live tumor cells’ responses to commonly-prescribed chemotherapy drugs using various AI models, and predicted the drugs most likely to work on the patient. Once the prediction report is made to a veterinarian, he or she can design a course of individualized treatment for each patient.

The study found that patients who had been tested achieved clinical remission much more quickly with their selected drugs. Such precision medicine service enables veterinarians to recommend drugs or drug combinations that will help their patients, rather than taking a trial and error approach to chemotherapy.

Industries