Abstract: It has been apparent for some time that certain dog breeds are prone to develop certain types of cancer. Specifically, studies completed between the late 1960's and the early 1980's defined relative risk of lymphoma for different dog breeds. Yet, there has been little progress since then to define factors that account for this risk. As part of ongoing programs supported by the AKC CHF in our laboratories, we showed recently that the breed-specific risk of lymphoma extends beyond the simple disease condition to a predisposition for specific forms of lymphoma. More importantly, we showed there are recurrent chromosomal abnormalities that segregate with specific forms of lymphoma and that are more common in Golden Retrievers than in other breeds, suggesting breed-specific profiles of genetic abnormalities will be found in canine lymphoma. To continue this work, we plan to use contemporary (array-based) technologies to identify genes that map to these regions and how they contribute to the disease. We anticipate that the results from this work will allow us to predict how heritable factors influence the occurrence of abnormalities in these genes, and will set the groundwork to identify specific genes associated with breed-dependent cancer risk.

Performance Summary: Principal Investigator is ahead of schedule and has hybridized samples from dogs with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and analysis of those micro array data has begun. Suitable numbers of dogs with tumors samples have been obtained; excellent progress.