Abstract: Background - Highly relevant pre-clinical animal models are essential to inform the most promising novel immunooncology drug candidates to advance into human clinical trials. Often, canine cancers closely mimic their human counterparts. The NCI’s Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis launched the ICDC in 2020 to make data from spontaneous canine cancer accessible for hypothesis-driven comparative analysis.
Hypothesis/Objectives - This report is an update after two years of ICDC development, informing the community of the new resources, features, and tools.
Animals - The ICDC contains the data for 598 dogs across 282 breeds, including 114 mixed breed dogs.
Methods - The ICDC is a publicly available, cloud-based repository built upon a graph database. The flexible ICDC data model can add nodes and properties as needed. Intuitive features developed to support the findability of data, data submission, and downstream data analysis help further research on human cancers by enabling comparative analysis.
Results - The ICDC now contains over 33TB of data for 857 unique samples. Key data types include pathology, WES, WGS, and RNA-Seq from 551 malignant tumors across more than 14 histologies and 168 normal tissue samples. The ICDC user interface is under continuous development to improve user experience and assist researchers in building cohorts pertinent to their scientific questions.
Conclusions/Clinical Importance - Dogs offer a unique comparative model that can be used to interrogate response similarities to cancer therapies in dogs versus humans, including tumor microenvironment composition, the prevalence of cancer specific mutations, and the landscape of tumor profiles.
.jpg "Amy K. LeBlanc, DVM, DACVIM (Oncology) photo")
