Welcome to Research Ethics Reimagined, a podcast created by Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, or PRIM&R. Here, we talk with scientists, researchers, bioethicists, and some of the leading minds exploring the new front frontiers of science. Join us to examine research ethics in the twenty first century and learn why it matters to you.
Catherine Batsford:I'm your host, Catherine Batsford.
Lisa Donnarumma:And I'm your co host, Lisa Donnarumma.
Catherine Batsford:In this episode, we are joined by Doctor. Mark Mamula to discuss his team's development of a novel cancer vaccine for dogs, research that's showing incredible promise. Doctor. Mamula is a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and a leading researcher in immunology and innovative vaccine development. His groundbreaking work on this novel cancer vaccine for dogs has garnered attention not only for its potential to revolutionize veterinary medicine, but also for its implications for human cancer treatment.
Catherine Batsford:Thank you so much for joining us today.
Mark Mamula:Thank you for that kind introduction. Too kind, actually. It's great to be here.
Catherine Batsford:Can you start by sharing a bit about your background and how you became involved in this innovative cancer vaccine research?
Mark Mamula:Yes, thank you. As you mentioned, we have initiated some studies in novel cancer therapies. And at the moment, at least, we've applied this to treating canine cancers, companion animals as it were. And I did get into this fairly honestly. I'm an immunologist by training.
Mark Mamula:The history of my work here at the Yale University School of Medicine is in studying mechanisms of autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, type one diabetes. There are a number of other autoimmune diseases that are relatively similar. Multiple sclerosis, for example. So in studying, having studied those diseases now for several decades, we've learned a lot about how our immune systems function and almost as importantly, how they dysfunction in creating these or triggering these autoimmune diseases. So, very, very simply put, these autoimmune diseases are immune responses towards your own tissues.
Mark Mamula:In multiple sclerosis, for example, you have immune responses that attack your own nervous system that create the pathology of that disease. And Type one diabetes immune responses attack the pancreas, the cells that make insulin for example. Now, is a direct correlation of how those immune responses happen. And for us, for immunologists, I should say, attacking a tumor tissue, which is really a self tissue is very similar to how your immune system attacks your central nervous system or your pancreas, for example. So we wanted to learn or actually apply what we've learned about how our immune systems attack tissues in specific how they attack tumor tissues and can we learn from both of those processes.
Mark Mamula:So that's how we got into it. More emotionally for me is that I'm a dog lover. I have had a dog that did not survive its cancer and this is now, gosh, ten or twelve years ago. So, it's really drawing on my experience to apply these to treating canine companion animal cancers?
Lisa Donnarumma:As a dog lover myself, Mark, I lost a dog two years ago to hemangio cancer. It was a very quick, an unfortunate, timely passing. And I currently have a dog with a mast cell tumor. And I'm finding more and more amongst my friends and then I compete in canine agility that many dogs, especially large breeds, are coming with these diagnosis of cancer. Hemangio is probably the worst, the worst I've ever seen.
Lisa Donnarumma:The mast cell tumor, at least there's some hope for it, but you know it's such an epidemic.
Mark Mamula:Yeah. Hemangiosarcoma is a very aggressive cancer as actually both you and I know. My own dog passed away from angiosarcoma, cardiac one and as you point out, these things progress and proceed very, very quickly In terms of weeks almost. And survival is very limited in dogs with those cancers. But interestingly you mentioned that particular cancer are present clinical trials are directed at treating hemangiosarcomas as well as osteosarcomas and what is called transitional cell carcinoma in dogs and that's bladder cancer.
Mark Mamula:So osteosarcoma is obviously a bone cancer. It's quite common in dogs, less common in humans, but nonetheless, how those diseases are initiated and progress and metastasize are virtually identical between dogs and humans. We can discuss more about some of how that happens shortly, I suppose, as well. But suffice it to say the tools that veterinarians have in treating dog cancers are much more limited compared to what we have in human cancers. So my role and interest in studying dog cancers is not only as a translational model for understanding human cancers but by necessity and by interest is in expanding that toolbox that veterinary oncologists have in treating their own patient populations, treating dogs.
Catherine Batsford:So in the Yale News article, it describes that this incredible promise of the vaccine shows for treating the cancer in dogs. What makes this approach so novel compared to traditional cancer treatments, which you're just saying are fairly limited for dogs, but a vaccine is so exciting to think you can just prevent it from the onset.
Mark Mamula:Well, you bring up obviously a couple of very interesting points. It is described as a vaccine. We also describe it as an immunotherapy, which is maybe a little more classy term for it. They in honesty, the use of the term vaccine has a number of different implications. True.
Mark Mamula:Connected to infectious disease for example. So in the context of cancer, we more often describe it as an immunotherapy. It is an injection of course and it triggers immune responses, hopefully that attack tumors. And that's the nature of both our basic research studies as well as our clinical trials is in defining how immune responses can attack these tumor tissues. The approach is, again, one that we studied in autoimmune diseases and it's roughly described as a neo antigen.
Mark Mamula:Neo antigen simply means it's a new antigen. It's a new protein that your immune system has never seen before. Give you thirty seconds of a class in
Lisa Donnarumma:immunology. Please do.
Mark Mamula:Immune systems have evolved to ignore our self proteins. Your white blood cells bump into cells of your liver and your kidneys or your pancreas or your central immune system, central nervous system, I'm sorry, and tend to ignore what they see there. We're tolerant of most of our self tissues. Now, that's not a perfect system that evolved because we do have autoimmune diseases where those white blood cells bump into lots of tissues and start to attack them. So fortunately, those cases are relatively rare.
Mark Mamula:Our immune systems evolved to protect us from pathogens, bacteria and viruses primarily, and they see those as foreign. So a neoantigen is something that is also foreign and can be in some cases, parts or portions of proteins on your own tissues. And those own tissues include tumours. So this is an approach using a neoantigen, a tumour protein that your immune system has presumably not seen before. And we and others have studied this both in autoimmune diseases and triggering autoimmune diseases as well as in triggering immune responses to tumors.
Mark Mamula:So we're not alone in our own group. It's not unique to us and we did not invent the field of neoantigens, but we've exploited it. So that is part of, I mean, you ask what makes our approach novel. I'd like to think that we picked the right neoantigens from a family of tumor proteins and that were smarter than the other people in having defined these. And that really was the intellectual work in developing these therapies.
Mark Mamula:We pick on a family of tumor proteins known as EGFR and HER2. You may have heard of these proteins. They're fairly public in the domain of knowing these therapies. You see commercials, for example, for immunotherapies for a number of these proteins. There are drugs, there are immune so called monoclonal antibodies that are used in human cancer therapies.
Mark Mamula:Herceptin is one of them. I'm not bumping any particular product that binds HER2 proteins that are found on a fraction of human breast cancer, colon cancer, and a number of other cancers in human therapy. Erbitux is another monoclonal antibody that binds EGFR and again is found on a number of human and canine cancers, including hemangiosarcoma and osteosarcoma. So the goal of our therapy is to provide an immunization and injection that triggers immune responses that have the biological activity of these drugs presently used in humans, Erbitux and Herceptin, for example. And indeed they do.
Mark Mamula:And we've demonstrated and published about those mechanisms.
Lisa Donnarumma:What would you say were some of the biggest challenges your team faced in developing the vaccine, both scientifically and ethically?
Mark Mamula:Terrific questions. Scientifically, we had to get lucky. I'm not ashamed to say we failed in trying to find a number of these neoantigens. And it was through the work of a number of people in our own lab and in others in picking parts of this protein family, actually small regions within the proteins that exist on the surface of tumors to find them and to test them first in mouse models of cancer to see if we could identify these so called neoantigens that trigger immune responses to tumors. And we failed in a number of attempts and we were successful in a number of attempts.
Mark Mamula:And we picked, of course, the successful ones to develop in uses in both veterinary oncology and potentially human oncology. You ask about the questions of ethics and moving forward with these therapies. I actually knew you were likely to ask that question. And I pulled up, I actually have it in front of me, the Webster's dictionary definition of ethical, the term ethical. And I read that it's pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality pertaining to right and wrong conduct.
Mark Mamula:And as a second definition, being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct of practice, especially in the standards of a profession. Okay, so what is standards of this profession? Meaning the veterinary professions or in human cancer care, that profession. And certainly the definition of ethical is probably different in veterinary care and in human cancer care. How is that?
Mark Mamula:We want to, of course, provide ethical therapy either in veterinary care or in human care. But again, those definitions I think do differ in a number of important ways. You're going to ask me what ways. I'm going to give you my opinion of that. For example, treating your dog and Lisa, you can identify with this approach as well.
Mark Mamula:Treating your dog ethically is very different than treating a human with cancer. You as the owner of your dog have the decision making process in treating your dog. And that process is different. It largely and it can be dictated by things like cost, right? Or economics of treating your dog.
Mark Mamula:If you don't have the resources to treat your dog with an expensive care, you may choose not to treat your dog. And that's your decision. It's not the decision of the veterinarian or the veterinary oncologist that is treating your dog. So the mindset of course, for treating canine cancers, any companion animal in any way of course, whether it's cancer or any other condition, diabetes in a dog, lupus in a dog, heart disease in a dog is much to the decision. It's in fact, the decision of the owner.
Mark Mamula:Choosing to do surgery decision again, inexpensive, unless you have insurance for your pets, can be a costly option. Of course, treating human cancer is a very different decision making process. You largely, hopefully adhere to the recommendations of your human clinician. It's out of your control many times unless you choose not to be treated at all. And of course, that's a whole ethical topic in and of itself.
Mark Mamula:So while we attempt to navigate both human and veterinary ethical standards, they are obviously different.
Catherine Batsford:So we know there's debate about using animals in research. It takes on such a different tone, I think, in some ways when you're looking for the answers for your pets. So what are your thoughts in general and how did your team ensure the welfare of the dogs involved while they were advancing this work? And you did say you used mice before you went to dogs, which is very similar to all animal research, even heading down to the human segment.
Mark Mamula:So I will rewind just a little bit. You asked about how we came to this line of investigation, this neoantigen line of investigation. Part of the intellectual input and process here was in using something in mice and in dogs that could be directly translatable, directly applicable to human cancers. So, we chose a neoantigen to dive in literally to the details of this therapy and it's published, so I'm not afraid to share any of the details, of course, is we picked an amino acid sequence, a string of amino acids in this tumor protein, EGFR and HER2, that were absolutely identical in sequence between mice, dogs and humans. So that in finding a successful neoantigen and therapeutic application in mice could likely be directly because it's an identical product literally between mouse, dogs and humans.
Mark Mamula:Okay. So, that lays the groundwork for how we thought about translating this care, hopefully with translation to humans ultimately. In an intermediate sense, my interest is in dogs, of course. But you ask again about the ethical considerations. So to me, and you guys can certainly correct me, to me, it is often a question of risk versus benefit, whether it's in mouse, dogs or in humans.
Mark Mamula:We all watch commercials for therapeutics in treating a number of human diseases. We watch them in commercials on TV and we all know that the last part of any commercial are the side effects, right? Which can be death, for example, in the use of some therapies in a number of human diseases. So the question in treating human diseases is always do no harm. And it is, I think in all of our minds in treating our own diseases.
Mark Mamula:Whether it's heart disease or diabetes for example. It's a risk versus benefit. What is the risk of taking a therapy versus the benefit meaning, will I risk death, for example, if I don't take this therapy? Or will one of the benefits be curing or treating whatever syndrome or disease that I suffer from? And dogs, of course, cannot speak for themselves, but the owners can.
Mark Mamula:So again, the ethics lie in the lap of no pun intended, your dogs exist in the owner's lap, but also the question of ethical use lies in the lap of owners as well.
Catherine Batsford:Well,
Mark Mamula:I'm not trying to evade the question. No, you're I'm trying to point out the distinction, I think, between considering canine cancer care versus human.
Catherine Batsford:I think that is clear. There's some talk that we've had at our conferences talking about children in cancer, and oftentimes parents are having to make those decisions for somebody who can't speak to the treatments. But no, that's
Mark Mamula:Having said that though, we do carefully monitor the safety issues of our own therapy. First done in mice, of course, and we carefully looked at potential off target effects, any pathologies that might be created by our therapy. And we were very, very careful. I'll tell you, there was nobody that lost more sleep in the first month or two of our clinical trials in dogs, which are still ongoing. We've now survived almost five years of trials in canine cancers without any immediate untoward off target effects.
Mark Mamula:No immediate hypersensitivity, which is a potentially common outcome of many drugs that are used not only for cancer care, but other care. For example, you, again, the disclaimer in seeing commercials on TV is don't use if you are allergic to X, Y, and Z that are in our therapy. Of course. Of course, no one would use that if you're if you have some immediate allergy or hypersensitivity to but again, we don't know if we do most frequently. We don't know what the components of a particular therapy are.
Mark Mamula:So those are a bit superfluous questions because as an end user, meaning you or me or the dog patient, we don't necessarily understand or know if there is hypersensitivity to any drugs we use until we experience them, of course. And your doctor says, Oh, you're hypersensitive. Oh, great. We now know that.
Catherine Batsford:So the research has powerful implications for veterinary medicine. And I think you've talked about you know, that connection to people, how you started your study design and the oversight for it. So I guess my question is, I'm not sure because I think you answered a lot of them. Was there anything that shaped this differently? I think, no, you always had the mindset that this was heading towards something for humans.
Catherine Batsford:So it was part of the process all along. Lisa, do you want to go to your question?
Lisa Donnarumma:Sure. Mean, in research like this, how do you balance urgency for developing life saving treatments with the need for rigorous ethical review and patient or participant safety along the same lines?
Catherine Batsford:Okay. Cause we all want to save our dogs right Well,
Mark Mamula:I'll tell you what, it'll sound like I'm digressing a bit and I'm not trying to and I'm not avoiding your question. I will certainly answer any of your questions. But you and I, Lisa, have both experienced as dog owners aggressive in aggressive cancer that that our dogs did not survive. And we know how quickly that arose. So I think at least for you and I having direct experience, our judgment or decision making in deciding to accept therapy or not, is based on real life experience.
Mark Mamula:I know that if I have a dog, another dog with hemangiosarcoma, I will be quick to use any new tool in treating that cancer. There are similar cancers in humans, of course, that I think any of us would accept as a new therapy investigational or not in treating that cancer and in knowing the likely outcome of, for example, a canine cancer like hemangiosarcoma. So the bar is very different for you and me, Lisa. Potentially a dog owner who has never had or experienced a dog with hemangiosarcoma in spite of what a veterinary oncologist will tell them about the disease, in spite of what anyone can read about this cancer in dogs, there is nothing like personal experience. So again, it's a benefit versus risk question to me.
Mark Mamula:And everyone will decide that slightly differently. But I'll tell you the best part of this study and I get many emails from our patients, which now number upwards of 600 or 700 patients, canine patients, is that I get emails from generally elderly people or disabled people or both. They have a dog who is a service animal to them. And they say, I need this dog literally to survive my day, to be a service animal to me, to and they're trained in remarkable ways, of course, and I could go on and on and in how many service animals are trained for specific purposes of their owners. Be it seeing eye dogs or be it dogs that detect health issues in their owners, dogs that allow them to function on a normal daily basis.
Mark Mamula:They email me and I could honestly well up when I hear these, when I read these emails, they say my dog now has cancer and this is a dog that I need to survive. Can they have or think about our therapy? And then the best part of this is getting an email from that same owner eight months or a year or two years later after having had our therapy saying, my dog is doing terrific. Thank you.
Catherine Batsford:That's incredible.
Lisa Donnarumma:That's amazing.
Mark Mamula:And I think you both read or and this is in of course the public domain. A service animal that we treated now several years ago. Yes. Hunter. Hunter was referred to me by I could go on.
Mark Mamula:You can stop me if I'm getting too verbose here. There was a undergraduate student here at Yale. He was the oldest undergraduate at this institution at the time and could be in the history of Yale undergraduates. He was 52 years old. He was a retired service person trained in the military special forces actually.
Mark Mamula:And he did several tours of The Middle East. And he had a K-nine military dog that traveled with him. His military dog was killed in combat. He wrote a book about this experience actually, but he later went on to fund a non profit organization to assist service animals of all kinds. And that can be military dogs.
Mark Mamula:It can be police dogs. Could be trained fire fighting dogs. So we were referred to a dog in his organization that had cancer. This is a dog that was trained to find survivors deceased individuals in catastrophic building collapses, for example, which happen frequently, right? Tornadoes will level buildings or hurricanes and they're looking for survivors.
Mark Mamula:This was a dog that was trained to climb through building collapses and try to find and seek survivors. Dog's name was Hunter. Hunter had osteosarcoma, had its front limb amputated and had metastases to the lung, which is the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in this cancer in dogs and in humans. I might add Hunter enrolled in our therapy and did quite well. In fact, is still alive now, I think three years after having gotten this cancer and the owner, the trainer slash owner was happy to talk to us and to Yale about her experience.
Mark Mamula:And Hunter continues to do well. We treat him annually with booster immunotherapies as I described them. And so that was, yes, one terrific and visual outcome of what actually are a number of good outcomes in our therapy. We don't cure every cancer. That is never going to be the claim of what we do.
Mark Mamula:Cancers, of course, in dogs and in humans, therapies do not work the same in all cancers, even the same cancers in different humans or the same cancers in different dogs. So the outcomes can vary between dogs and between humans. And we can talk about why that is. Simply put, it's because of features of the individual cancer. You and I can have the same cancer.
Mark Mamula:I may have, I will have different mutations, different genetics. We are of different age and different gender and all of those characteristics change how an individual responds to a particular therapy. Again, both in dogs and in humans.
Catherine Batsford:So is this immunotherapy used in humans yet or is it still with?
Mark Mamula:This is not yet considered in human therapies. We've not initiated human clinical trials with this therapy. Other related neoantigen clinical trials are continuing to be investigated in human cancers. We hope that ours becomes one of them. My efforts and my bandwidth quite literally is in getting this out to canine cancers.
Mark Mamula:And perhaps when enough data or more data is obtained in treating canine cancers, it will be more the pathway to treating human cancers will be much easier. I will tell you that there is a field called comparative oncology that has continued to use canine cancers as I was going to say models for treating human cancers, but they're not a model. They are a parallel disease that is virtually identical to human cancers. We talked about osteosarcoma, bone cancer in dogs and humans. The genetics, the features of metastases and the morbidity and risk of mortality is identical between dogs and humans.
Mark Mamula:Such is the case dogs get melanoma, for example, that have many of the same mutations and features as human melanoma. So this field of what we know or what's defined as comparative oncology is now being exploited for better treatment of human cancers. For example, treating human osteosarcoma often, if possible, starts with what's called limb sparing surgery. So instead of amputation of a limb with osteosarcoma, either in humans or in dogs, a surgical expertise that was pioneered in dogs, limb sparing surgery, which is removing the tumor, but putting braces into the affected limb to maintain the integrity of that limb without amputation was first pioneered in dogs and now widely used in human osteosarcoma.
Lisa Donnarumma:We wanted to ask you about collaboration. That seems like a key part of the research. Are there any partnerships across the disciplines and possibly with pet owners influencing the direction and the success of the study?
Mark Mamula:That's also a terrific question. And we had to navigate that very carefully here at Yale because Yale does not have a school of veterinary medicine. So was so how to solve that, which was another obstacle, a big obstacle actually, is we had to collaborate either with other academic institutions that have vet schools, or we had to, for lack of a better term, invade or penetrate private practice veterinarians. And we actually did both. We set up clinical trials with large veterinary oncology practices around the country and a consortium of veterinary practices called MedVet.
Mark Mamula:I guess I must also reveal a potential conflict of interest as it were. I did start a company, therajan.com, therajan.com. You can cut this out if you need to. But again, in full disclosure, this is a company that will hopefully and ultimately manage this veterinary therapeutic. So we had to find and this is all USDA regulated.
Mark Mamula:The the USDA regulates everything that's done in animals. Not only companion animals or pets. But also in cows, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, everything, food animals, any therapy, bird flu, chickens, for example, all regulated by the USDA. The FDA regulates some veterinary products, but mostly regulates human therapies. But we have a USDA approved exploratory study as they call it, the product that we are trying to better understand and develop.
Mark Mamula:And ultimately, they will license Theragun to use this and to widely distribute that hopefully. And we're hoping to get that in the coming months. The timing of how those it's as any government process very time consuming. There's a lot of bureaucracy, but they carefully regulate these things for very good reasons, of course.
Catherine Batsford:How does an IACUC play into this for the folks on our IACUC committees and interest in this? What juncture is the IACUC involved?
Mark Mamula:IACUC's involved both locally. The USDA is essentially our IACUC for clinical trials, But our local IACUC has reviewed all of our protocols for use in mice and actually use in dogs as well. But again, we don't have a vet school here. So the use in dogs doesn't necessarily pertain to what we do locally, but more outside the institution.
Catherine Batsford:Were there any unexpected questions that popped up working with them or smooth sailing?
Mark Mamula:Oh gosh, All sorts of questions as you might examine, imagine, including the obvious things, dosing, toxicity. Did we do all of those things? And simply put, yes, we've done all of those things starting in mice. And in early studies in dogs that have received our therapy, we've looked at pathology of every tissue of recipients of our therapy from gosh, literally every tissue, brain, heart, lung, liver, heart, skin, GI tract or off target potential untoward effects. So yes, we had to dot I's and cross T's at every step.
Mark Mamula:Important. Yes. So if any listeners of this broadcast have dogs like Lisa or myself that are suffering from at the moment osteosarcoma, hemagiosarcoma or transitional cell carcinoma. There are a couple of sources, resources that one can find clinical trial sites for our therapy. They are listed on the theragun.com site.
Mark Mamula:They are also listed on another site, the Canine Cancer Alliance. You can Google that. They list all of our clinical trial sites. They are a nonprofit organization dedicated to curing canine cancers. And again, full disclosure, the Canine Cancer Alliance supports our clinical trials so that our patients receive our therapy at no cost.
Mark Mamula:At least for our therapy, they may experience costs involved with treating their dogs with chemotherapies or office visits at the clinical trial sites. But our therapy is provided at no charge at the
Catherine Batsford:That's We'll
Lisa Donnarumma:make sure it's
Catherine Batsford:included in our study guide. Lisa, go ahead.
Lisa Donnarumma:I was just going to ask about for I'm sorry.
Catherine Batsford:No, it's perfect. That's my dog
Lisa Donnarumma:protects UPS in the neighborhood, not bombs or people missing. This is their job.
Mark Mamula:No, I think your dog is agreeing with my comments about treating dogs with Absolutely
Lisa Donnarumma:right. For researchers hoping to push boundaries with their own work, what advice would you offer about maintaining strong ethical principles while pursuing their innovation?
Mark Mamula:Again, a great question. My advice is to pay attention to your local institution, IACUC, and standards of care, not only in dogs, in fact, probably not dogs. I suspect most of your listeners are doing investigations either in humans or in other animal models, and to carefully consider and take the advice of those that they consult with, be it IACUC or other regulatory agencies. I personally take those regulations extremely seriously to reduce potential pain and suffering associated with doing new investigations. Will, one will always experience unanticipated consequences of therapy.
Mark Mamula:Our own therapy, for example, we did observe in early studies that a small fraction of our dogs will get inflammation at the site of where our therapy is injected. It is only about one in five dogs, about fifteen to twenty percent. It will be a little lump under the skin where the injection site occurs, But that nonetheless is one side effect. It fortunately is not painful to the dogs. And in fact, injections like this or immunizations as even humans experience, you know that sometimes there's some, oh, at the site of say a flu vaccine in your arm, there may be pain and or mild fever for a couple of days after any human immunization.
Mark Mamula:As an immunologist, I would like to say that is actually a good sign that you feel a little pain or a little fever. What that means is that your immune cells, your white blood cells are at the site of that injection and they're starting to take in and digest and process that immunization. You will have a very good immune response, generally speaking, when that when that site reaction occurs. And such is the case actually in our dogs that get those minor reactions.
Catherine Batsford:It's good to know. What is next for this immunotherapy?
Mark Mamula:What is next? Well, ultimately, well, in the short term, I'll take the short and long term here. We are attempting to get licensing. It's called conditional licensing from the USDA. So in the shorter term, we are seeking conditional licensing that will allow us wider distribution of our therapy.
Mark Mamula:It will also potentially allow us to examine other tumors in dogs that have this family of proteins, EGFR and HER2. In dogs and in humans, that includes breast cancers, some breast cancers, colon cancers, some melanomas, non small cell lung cancer. In dogs, it also includes anal sac carcinoma, soft tissue sarcomas, thyroid cancers, as well as some adenocarcinomas. So there is a much larger laundry list of cancers that we may be able to treat in dogs. And again, providing important translational data for potentially treating humans with those same cancers as well.
Mark Mamula:The latter will be the much longer term goals of our therapy is in providing efficacy data for those other tumor types and providing seed data for studying those cancers in humans with our therapy.
Catherine Batsford:When you went through that list, I don't know anyone who hasn't been affected by one of those for dog, for human. Truly to Oh,
Mark Mamula:glioblastomas as well, another important human and canine cancer as well. But you're right. Yeah, we've all had you know, acquaintances, either canine acquaintances or humans with those cancers.
Lisa Donnarumma:Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Doctor. Mamula, for joining us and sharing your insights on this incredible research journey. And thanks to our listeners for tuning into Research Ethics Reimagine. Be sure to subscribe and join us next time as we continue exploring the evolving world of research ethics.
Mark Mamula:Thank you again. It's been a pleasure being here.
Catherine Batsford:Thank you. This is incredible. And I love was that Ben or was that Jerry?
Lisa Donnarumma:That's Jerry. Yeah.
Mark Mamula:Great dog names, Ben and Jerry.
PRIM&R:Thank you for listening to Research Ethics Reimagined, a podcast created by Primer and produced by Syntax in Motion. Please subscribe and share with your friends and colleagues. To learn how to become a member of Primer, please visit us at www.primer.org. Be sure to join us next month as we continue our conversation with scientists, researchers, bioethicists, and some of the leading minds exploring new frontiers of science.