EC25F-396: Mapping the Druggable Landscape of Feline Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Oral tumors in cats are devastating diseases with no acceptable treatment approach. Most cats, once diagnosed with an oral tumor, are compassionately euthanized. The most common feline oral tumor is oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Upwards of 3 in 1000 cats are diagnosed with OSCC, making it important to find curative approaches to this disease.
We and others have been trying to find small molecule drugs which might cure OSCC in cats but have not yet found a suitable candidate for clinical trials. Cancer drugs largely fall into two categories: cytotoxic chemotherapeutic drugs which attempt to kill the cancer faster than the rest of the body, and ‘targeted’ drugs that try to exploit signaling pathways which a tumor depends upon and healthy cells do not. We are particularly interested in targeted drugs, as they typically have a wider safety margin than chemotherapeutics. Choosing the correct drug requires a much better understanding of the disease than is currently available.
Our goal is to generate a library of gene expression data using the RNA-seq technique. This will mimic the successful Cancer Genome Atlas approach in humans and create a resource which we and others might consult to better understand feline OSCC. We will validate key hypotheses we generate using standard histology approaches. Finally, we will use clinically relevant small molecules to treat feline OSCC cell lines, as a first step toward clinical translation of our results.  (George Sydney and Phyllis Redmond Miller Trust Grant Awards)