Important progress in mammary cancer treatment and anticancer drug developmentProfessor Jung Hyang Sur of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Konkuk University announced on August 2 that they have identified a large-scale genome and transcript for mammary cancer treatment and development of anti-cancer drugs using the next generation sequence analysis method (NGS) in collaboration with Yonsei University and Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology. The study was supported by the original technology development project bio-medical technology development project led by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Communication, and the paper (genome and transcript analysis database of large scale mammary tumor using next generation sequence analysis was published in August 2019 in the Nature sister magazine Scientific data.The study was conducted by Professor Jung Hyang Seo of the College of Veterinary Medicine (co-author), Byung jun Seung (co-author), Sang Woo Kim of the Yonsei University College of Medicine, Professor Ho-jung Nam of Gwangju Institute of Technology (co-author). The joint research team of Konkuk University and Yonsei University examined the mammary gland tumors, the highest incidence among cancer in the dogs, secured the mammary gland tissues of the large animal and the normal tissues adjacent to the mammary gland (eg, adjacent normal-tissue), urine and buffy-coat, and histopathologic diagnosis of the tumor and RNA-in situ hybridization and immunohistochemical staining for the carcinogens from the hospitals in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. Also, a team of Professor Sang-woo Kim of Yonsei University Severance Hospital conducted whole-exome sequencing and whole-transcriptome sequencing.
Konkuk University is the world's first to analyze such large-scale tumor genome (DNA) and transcript (RNA) data in companion animals based on published research up to date. Most cancers, including human breast cancer, have already been used for the development of various therapeutic drugs, including chemotherapeutic agents, because they have good genome, transcript, metabolism and proteome analysis. However, There is no treatment other than that. Even in the case of chemotherapy, the currently used anticancer drugs all depend on the anticancer drugs used in humans, so their therapeutic effect is also very low.The results of the large-scale genome and transcript analysis of these cancers are expected to be of great help in the diagnosis and treatment of animal tumors. Companion animals, like humans, are expected to be invaluable in developing therapeutic agents to use targeted therapies for specific cancers. Furthermore, because tumors arising in dogs living in the same environment as humans are naturally occurring diseases along with aging, human cancer research is likely to be of comparative value.Based on the large-scale database obtained in this study, Konkuk University and Yonsei University collaborated on a comparative study of human breast cancer with additional research papers. In addition, a database including genomes, transcripts and trans isomers was constructed.Further studies are underway to identify early tumor markers using urine and blood samples from additional tumor-producing dogs. ANIVET, a participant of the research project, is developing a diagnostic kit for animal tumors using the tumor markers which were revealed through this study.