Abstract

Cancer drug development is inefficient, costly, and rarely leads to effective new drugs. Game-changing therapies that transform cancer care are the exception rather than the norm. As a solution, Drug DISCO (Development Incentivization Strategy in Comparative Oncology) is suggested as a means to re-position Comparative Oncology as a parallel and integrated approach to cancer drug development that includes dogs with spontaneous cancer during human clinical trials. This distinct approach recognizes the broader integrated/parallel value of Comparative Oncology for clinical development teams to use data from studies in the dog to answer questions as a means to optimize Phase II and Phase III human trials. This alternate focus will result in better definitions of dose, schedule, indication, and biomarkers of response of targeted therapies, and will collectively increase the chance of success in human trials beyond phase I studies. Ideally this will result in greater iteration within a drug development path rather than the existing binary succeed or fail approach. Drug DISCO also provides an opportunity to enhance the development of drugs that can prevent metastatic recurrence. Collectively we expect important therapeutic advances from this approach.