Palladia:New Cancer Treatment for Dogs

Last week (sorry I’m a bit behind because of my trip)  Pfizer announced Palladia a new drug developed to treate cancer in dogs.  More specifically Palladia was designed to treat Mast Cell tumors, a potentially serious type of cancer that accounts for about 20 percent of canine skin tumors. Mast cell tumors can be very aggressive and spread to other parts of the body, including lymph nodes, if not treated.

Canine Cancer Drug

“This cancer drug approval for dogs is an important step forward for veterinary medicine,” Bernadette Dunham, director of FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. “Prior to this approval, veterinarians had to rely on human oncology drugs without knowledge of how safe or effective they would be for dogs,” she said. Pfizer said it would begin selling Palladia in early 2010, but will make the oral drug available to certain veterinary oncology specialists prior to that.

Palladia works by killing tumor cells and by cutting off the blood supply to the tumor.The pill must be taken every other day and the dog will likely have to be on the therapy for several months or longer, depending on tumor response, Pfizer said.

Unfortunately, Pfizer declined to divulge the cost of the treatment or to forecast what annual Palladia sales might be. The world’s biggest drugmaker said it will likely announce the price of the drug sometime this summer. In clinical trials, some 60 percent of dogs treated with Palladia, known chemically as toceranib, had their tumors disappear, shrink or stop growing, Pfizer said.

Tucker

In spending time at The Veterinary Cancer Group I met many dogs being treated for mast cell tumors. One adorable Beagle named Murphy was going to need 20 radiation treatments for his mast cell tumor. Both Tucker, my dog from college and Rusty, my Dad’s dog had Mast Cell tumors, but each was caught early and we were able to have them removed and the cancer never returned

Murphy had to get 20 treatments because his tumor was in his groin region and doctors weren’t able to remove the tumor with large enough margins to be sure it didn’t spread. So for dogs like Murphy Palladia is welcome news!

Unfortunately Palladia wouln’t have helped my sweet Bella, but where there is one cancer drug for dogs I hope more cancer drugs will follow.

Rusty the Rottie

Pfizer Animal Health estimates 1.2 million new canine cancer cases are reported in the United States every year.

To find out more about canine cancer how you can protect your dog, check out the following links:

Land of Pure Gold Foundation

Nine Ways to Precent Canine Cancer

The Morris Animal Foundation

canine cancer sucks

this week has not been all that fun. an mri on monday showed that bella has a tumor in a hard to reach spot under her armpit. a biopsy and ultra-sound done on wednesday confirms that it’s cancer; either a spindle cell tumor or an osteosarcoma. both are aggressive types of cancer.

i have started, stopped, erased  and restarted this post at least 6 times. how do you even write about this? but when you have a blog about dogs, how do you not write about it???

ughhh. i love her. i love her more than i can easily communicate. with absolute certainty i can say she has made me the person i am today- literally. without her i wouldn’t have gotten into rescue; wouldn’t have written a book- i wouldn’t have had something to write about. she is my rock. 

i am grateful for the time we have had together,  and while i don’t want it to be one day shorter than it can be, i promise not to be selfish. it makes me crazy when i see people putting their dogs through hellish cancer treatments so that they live just a few more weeks. i’m a big believer in leaving the party when everyone’s having a good time.

i mean i understand the inclination to try every avenue of treatment completely. of course you want to be with your dog forever. but it can’t happen. and moreover as opposed to treating humans with disease, dogs can’t communicate in the same way. i can’t exactly ask bella what she wants. so then it’s back to me making decision for her which can be confusing. am i making the right decisions. is this for her or for me or…or…or.  UGH!

so before i spin out of control, i come back to this. i love her and i know her. we have had a good ride and hopefully i’ll know when it’s time to let go. i won’t be happy about it, but it will be right. 

in the meantime send your good thoughts to bella for her days to be happy and as pain free as possible. 

hugs

bella & betsy

bella & pet insurance

bella has been a card carrying subscriber of petcare insurance since 2003. and thank god. soon after purchasing the policy bella burst her spleen and had to have emergency surgery to save her life. the costs came to well over $2300 dollars. within a few weeks of submitting the claim petcare wrote me a check for $1700 dollars !!! that was 70% of the cost, minus my deductible.  how awesome is that?

within the last week, we have found what appears to be cancer in my sweet bella. it’s probably a bone tumor; not easy kind of cancer to deal with.  i made the call today to petcare. and to be honest i was/is/am really freaked. will they cover this? i mean i knew they covered her last time, but i’ve heard all the horror stories of both human and pet insurance companies not covering on technicalities.
while i of course don’t have anything in writing, i did have an incredibly reassuring phone conversation with the petcare representative. his name was gabriel and he was great. i have some tough decisions ahead on how to best chart the course of dealing with cancer. but at least with insurance i have a little less stress about how i’m going to pay for the decisions i make.

for more information on pet insurance click here for a great article in the houston chronicle about pet insurance!

think good thoughts for my bella girl!