For the past four years since his arrival in Gainesville, UF College of Veterinary Medicine assistant professor Jon Kim, D.V.M., Ph.D., and his team have been accelerating research in comparative oncology and developing novel diagnostic and clinical applications utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to advance cancer treatments in both canines and humans.
Much of Kim and his team’s work focuses on canine hemangiosarcoma, a common, highly aggressive malignant cancer of the blood vessels, which affects the spleen, heart and livers of older, large breed dogs and accounts for about 5-7% of all tumors diagnosed in dogs.
A new five-year, $3.1 million R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute, “Naturally Occurring Canine Hemangiosarcoma as a Translational Model for Angiosarcoma,” prioritizes impactful translational research on canine hemangiosarcoma and angiosarcoma in humans.
“This award offers a groundbreaking and exceptional opportunity to advance work on canine hemangiosarcoma with a promising human element, while also expanding our artificial intelligence work with NCI support,” Kim said.
Cancer does not distinguish between people and man’s best friend and, therefore, canine cancer research operates as a powerful bridge to human medicine.
Canine hemangiosarcoma serves as a naturally occurring, clinically relevant model for human angiosarcoma due to similarities in their genomic landscape, cellular origin and metastatic behavior, opening the door to a world of opportunities for scientists like Kim who strive to better understand the pathogenesis of diseases and develop innovative treatments for both animals and humans.
Unlike relatively common hemangiosarcoma in canines, angiosarcoma is a very rare soft-tissue cancer in humans that develops in the inner walls of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels. Tumors most commonly form in the skin, breast, liver or spleen and the cancer has a high-grade malignancy rate.
How rare is angiosarcoma? According to the NCI, angiosarcomas make up only 1% to 2% of all sarcomas and sarcomas themselves make up less than 1% of human cancer. For every one million people, just one will be diagnosed with angiosarcoma per year in the United States.
Because it is exceptionally rare, angiosarcoma research is not well funded compared to more common cancers, making the $3.1M NIH investment in Kim’s research a critical step toward gathering meaningful data to leverage canine hemangiosarcoma as a translational model for human angiosarcoma.
Collaborating with a team of three other co-investigators, including CVM veterinary surgeon Elizabeth Maxwell, D.V.M., DACVS, veterinary anatomic pathologist Valentina Stevenson, D.V.M., Ph.D., DACVP, and artificial intelligence expert Angelos Barmpoutis, Ph.D., from UF’s College of the Arts, the team will have three foci for establishing a reliable translational model.
First is establishing a robust data biorepository to create cell lines and lab materials for research. The higher incidence of naturally occurring hemangiosarcoma in dogs offers the research team more data to work from.
“Artificial intelligence favors data,” Kim said. “With rare types of cancer like angiosarcoma, you naturally have much less data. We are in a unique position to gather enriched canine data at CVM to support this project.”
The second focus is utilizing xenograft models to test the efficacy of targeted canine and human angiosarcoma therapeutic treatments that block growth signals in tumor cells, or RAS inhibitors. The team will compare and analyze the efficacy of treatments to identify cross-species convergent pathways, or shared molecular networks that arrive at a similar outcome or disease state despite the two different species.
“Human clinical trials are designed based on basic research and preclinical studies,” Kim explained. “By taking advantage of UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer to process our complex canine data set, our hope at the end of the project is to develop a sophisticated, reliable model that predicts clinical outcomes and therapeutic response.”
Finally, the team will develop AI models to assess molecular relevance and demonstrate the therapeutic potential of canine hemangiosarcoma offering valuable translational insights for human angiosarcoma.
Think personalized, precision medicine for canines with an expedited, translational impact on angiosarcoma treatment in human medicine. A win-win for both man and his best friend.
Kim’s newest NIH award elevates his comparative oncology research program at the University of Florida to $4 million collectively across four projects focused on canine hemangiosarcoma and translational angiosarcoma research. Two U.S. Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program projects focus on comparative angiosarcoma and are co-led by Kim’s postdoctoral associate, Donghee Lee, Ph.D., and two projects from South Korea’s Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency support the development of AI-driven applications for pathologic diagnosis, treatment and prognosis for three major canine malignancies: melanoma, mammary tumors and hemangiosarcoma.
Kim was hired at the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2022 through UF’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative. In addition to his Comparative and Computational Cancer Biology and Translational Oncology (C3BIO) lab, his interdisciplinary work spans UF Health’s Cancer Institute, the Artificial Intelligence Academic Initiative (AI2) Center and the Intelligent Critical Care Center (IC3) at the University of Florida.