Researchers from the US have developed a cancer vaccine able to slow or halt the progression of certain cancers in dogs.
Cancer remains a leading cause of death among dogs, with traditional treatments often coming with significant limitations and challenging side effects.
This immunotherapy technology, developed at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, gets the dog immune cells to produce antibodies that hunt the protein receptors in tumour cells that are responsible for their uncontrolled growth.
The vaccine is now under review by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), after undergoing successful multiple trials.
One of the treated dogs includes an 11-year-old golden retriever named Hunter (pictured and featured on YouTube), who had bone cancer, but has shown no signs of cancer two years post-diagnosis.
Mark Mamula, the lead researcher at Yale, said: "Dogs, just like humans, get cancer spontaneously; they grow and metastasize and mutate, just like human cancers do.”
This breakthrough was published in Translational Oncology.