Join us in June for the second part of our mini-symposium on canine cancer as an emerging model for cancer research.

Dogs experience spontaneously arising cancer at roughly five times the rate that humans do, and their immune systems and environmental exposures are very similar to those of humans. Recent work in both “wet” and “dry” labs have produced valuable new methods for sample collection and diagnosis; breed prediction and classification; and tumor microenvironment and genetic analysis. These advances promise to yield better outcomes for dogs and humans.

Dr. Shaying Zhao will speak on her lab’s development of new bioinformatic research methods in comparative oncology in her talk titled “MHC genotyping, tumor-specific neoantigen discovery, and T cell repertoire characterization for the dog.”

Dr. Heather Gardner will describe developments in minimally invasive diagnostic techniques in a talk titled “Considerations for longitudinal liquid biopsy analysis in spontaneous canine cancers.”

About our speakers

Shaying Zhao, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia

Dr. Zhao’s research focuses on dog-human comparative genomics and oncology research.  Her group has successfully developed a novel dog-human comparison strategy for cancer driver-passenger discrimination, a central aim of cancer research.  Her lab is building essential experimental and computational pipelines to enhance the canine model in cancer immunotherapy research. 

Heather Gardner, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Oncology) is an assistant professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. Her laboratory efforts center on comparative and translational oncology, using the tumor genome to inform novel therapeutic approaches. Dr. Gardner earned her DVM at Washington State University and completed her Residency in Medical Oncology at the Ohio State University before completing her PhD in Genetics at Tufts University.