System Biology Research to Advance the Understanding of Canine Cancer

Dogs are easy to train and have far superior olfactory abilities than humans, making them suitable for a wide range of tasks. Therapy dogs are used in psychiatric hospitals to improve the socialization and interaction of disabled patients, thereby improving their quality of life. Unfortunately, dogs have been becoming more and more susceptible to diseases, the most serious of which is cancer, in recent years. Every year, over one million new cases are reported in the United States, with an estimated mortality rate of around 30%. It is our responsibility to save the life of an animal in this situation. Canine cancers, predictably, bear an uncanny resemblance to human cancers. While dog domestication is comparable to human domestication, it opens the door to studying human cancers through the lens of dog cancer. Early detection of cancer may be advantageous for therapeutic reasons, which necessitates the development of markers that can be used as diagnostic tools due to their differential expression between disease and normal state. Pets with unexpected cancers serve as a good model for human oncology translational research. There are numerous system biology techniques that can be used to detect cancer and the biomarkers that are associated with it in its early stages. Microarray, whole-genome sequencing, whole-exome sequencing, and RNA sequencing are novel, well-organized techniques that can be applied to a wide range of applications. They will allow for high-throughput analysis of variations in DNA, mRNA, protein expression, and activity in a patient’s tumor. Therefore, in this chapter, we reviewed recent system biology applications that have been evolved to better understand life-threatening diseases such as tumors. We also described several different types of canine cancer. Biomarker identification using system biology approaches, and therapeutic intervention for canine cancer biomarkers, are presented. Additionally, we also highlight the various ways in which dogs can serve as models for cancer research.