Gene expression profiles of human osteosarcoma

Pulmonary metastasis continues to be the most common cause of death in osteosarcoma. Indeed, the 5-year survival for newly diagnosed osteosarcoma patients has not significantly changed in over 20 years. Further understanding of the mechanisms of metastasis and resistance for this aggressive pediatric cancer is necessary. Pet dogs naturally develop osteosarcoma providing a novel opportunity to model metastasis development and progression. Given the accelerated biology of canine osteosarcoma, we hypothesized that a direct comparison of canine and pediatric osteosarcoma expression profiles may help identify novel metastasis-associated tumor targets that have been missed through the study of the human cancer alone. Collectively, these data support the strong similarities between human and canine osteosarcoma and underline the opportunities provided by a comparative oncology approach as a means to improve our understanding of cancer biology and therapy.

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Paoloni M, Davis S, Lana S, Withrow S, Sangiorgi L, Picci P, Hewitt S, Triche T, Meltzer P, Khanna C