Tufts Veterinarians Just Joined a $15 Million Push to Finally Beat Osteosarcoma. Dogs Are Central to Why It Could Work.

Osteosarcoma treatment has barely moved in 40 years. Children and young adults diagnosed with this aggressive bone cancer still face the same intense chemotherapy, the same major surgeries, and the same devastating prognosis that defined treatment in the 1980s. The era of precision oncology has transformed outcomes for many cancers. Osteosarcoma has largely been left behind.

A new national research initiative is designed to change that, and veterinarians are not a footnote in the effort. They are core to why it might finally succeed.

Break Through Cancer's Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab, backed by a $15 million investment from patient-driven foundations, brings together more than 20 researchers from eight leading institutions in a coordinated, multiyear push to understand why osteosarcoma responds to treatment or spreads, and how therapies can be more precisely designed to stop it. Two veterinary oncologists from Tufts University's Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine are central to the effort: Dr. Cheryl London, associate dean for research and Anne Engen and Dusty Professor in Comparative Oncology, and Dr. Heather Gardner, assistant professor and Usen Family Career Development Professor.

Their role is to conduct clinical trials of emerging therapies in pet dogs with osteosarcoma, generating data that will directly inform at least two new pediatric studies by 2030.

Why Dogs Are the Right Research Partner

The connection between canine and human osteosarcoma is not incidental. It is biological.

Osteosarcoma affects more than 25,000 dogs in the United States every year, compared to fewer than 1,000 children, teenagers, and young adults. The disease presents the same way in both species: it originates in bone, causes severe pain requiring surgical removal, and spreads to the lungs with a resistance to treatment that has proven nearly impossible to overcome. The genetic mutation profiles in canine and human osteosarcoma look remarkably similar at the molecular level.

That similarity matters for research in ways that go beyond simple analogy. Pet dogs enrolled in clinical trials have intact immune systems, unlike the mouse models that dominate preclinical cancer research. The immune system is central to how cancer progresses and how it develops resistance to therapy, and existing mouse models struggle to replicate it. Dogs don't have that limitation.

There is also a practical dimension that is uncomfortable to acknowledge but scientifically significant. The course of osteosarcoma in dogs is rapid, often fatal within one to two years. That compressed timeline allows researchers to observe responses to new therapies and gather outcome data far faster than human trials permit. As Dr. Gardner explains, there is strong rationale to try new therapies in canine patients that wouldn't yet be justified in people, and to apply what is learned across both species.

What Tufts Brings to the Collaboration

The Cummings School team is contributing clinical trial infrastructure, advanced genomics expertise, and liquid biopsy technology that analyzes circulating tumor DNA and immune responses from blood samples to show or predict treatment response. That last capability is particularly significant for a disease as genomically complex as osteosarcoma.

Dr. London describes the disease as genomically noisy, with so many genetic changes occurring simultaneously that identifying which ones actually drive the cancer has been extraordinarily difficult. Collecting and integrating genomic and outcome data across species, human and canine, is designed to reduce that noise and isolate the key drivers that can then be targeted with more precision.

The Tufts team plans to offer four to six clinical trials for pet dogs over the first four years of the initiative, with the flexibility to adapt as findings emerge from across the eight-institution collaborative. Real-time data sharing across all research units is built into the structure of the TeamLab, a design choice that directly addresses one of the historic barriers to osteosarcoma research: fragmented, institution-siloed efforts working with insufficient patient numbers and limited resources.

Why This Model Matters for Veterinary Medicine

The Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab is one of the clearest current examples of comparative oncology operating at scale. It treats the natural disease in pet dogs not as a convenient model but as a genuine parallel research opportunity, one that benefits dogs, informs human medicine, and advances the understanding of cancer biology in ways neither species-specific approach could achieve alone.

For veterinary oncologists, it represents the kind of institutional validation that the field has been building toward for years. For pet owners whose dogs are living with osteosarcoma, the clinical trials being developed through this initiative offer access to emerging therapies alongside the knowledge that their dog's participation is contributing to a larger effort that could change outcomes for the next generation of both canine and human patients.

The goal, as Dr. London states plainly, is to cure more people and dogs of this devastating disease. That goal now has $15 million, 20-plus researchers, and a coordinated structure behind it. Forty years is long enough to wait.

TAGS: oncology, osteosarcoma, comparative oncology, canine cancer, clinical trials, Tufts, Cummings School, research, One Health, pediatric cancer, bone cancer