Gifts boost cancer program in veterinary medicine

Veterinary medicine doctors, from left to right, Gregory MacEwen, David Vail and Lisa Forrest, evaluate follow-up X-rays of a dog. The school treats up to 3,000 pets a year.

The cancer treatment program at UW–Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, which has become one of the nation’s largest, is looking for room to grow.

School officials have created a $250,000 campaign to create a new Cancer Recovery Ward to accommodate the huge increase in pets being treated and to provide more modern facilities. It also just completed a $500,000 project to install a new computerized tomography (CT) scanner, which provides researchers with an extremely precise diagnostic tool.

“Our program has really grown in recent years, and there’s no sign it’s going to slow down,” says Gregory MacEwen, an oncologist with the school. In recent years, the program has treated between 2,500 and 3,000 pets each year that are referred from across the country.

Veterinary oncology was a small and relatively unknown field only a decade ago, but treatments have become much more promising in recent years, MacEwen says. Advances have almost cured early-stage melanoma in pets, he says, and have an 80 percent success rate in treating soft-tissue cancers. With new drugs to treat bone cancer and lymphoma, doctors can typically add 12 to 18 months to the life of a family pet.

As a result, veterinarians in the field are now more likely to refer animal cancer cases to schools with oncology programs. Although the treatments are expensive, averaging $1,500 per client, more pet owners are willing to take the extra step.

In addition to helping animals, veterinary cancer programs can advance knowledge on human cancer as well. “Occasionally we can move ahead with some experimental treatments and provide some pre-clinical data for human cancer trials,” he says.

The Cancer Recovery Ward will provide a separate and more comfortable environment for the animals, which are often hospitalized for three to four weeks and are recovering from major surgeries or are receiving chemotherapy.

The CT scanner will be a major boon to the cancer research program, MacEwen says, because it can be used to precisely monitor the response of tumors to therapy. It is also an essential tool for diagnosis and planning of radiation treatments.

The school has received a timely boost in private gifts to help these developments along, according to Nancy Nelson, director of development for the school. The Jaqua Foundation, a New Jersey-based animal protection organization, donated $50,000 this fall to start fund-raising efforts for the new recovery ward.

Private donors gave a total of $90,000 to support the CT scanner purchase. In addition, the UW–Madison chancellor’s office and the UW Foundation funded the remainder of the $500,000 renovation project.