Early immunohistochemical detection of pulmonary micrometastases in dogs with osteosarcoma

Abstract

Abstract Background Despite decades of research, the early phases of metastatic development are still not fully understood. Canine osteosarcoma (OS) is a highly aggressive cancer, with a high metastatic rate (> 90%), despite a low overt metastatic prevalence at initial diagnosis ( 50 tumour cells) and TP-3 positive single cells ( 90%) based on commonly expected metastatic rates after amputation (P < 0.0001). There was no statistically significant difference in the number of TP-3 positive single cells in between groups (P = 0.85). Conclusions Pulmonary micrometastases could be detected with TP-3 immunohistochemistry in a subset of dogs with OS before macroscopic metastases had developed. We propose that dogs with spontaneous OS represent clinically relevant models to study early micrometastatic disease.

Keywords

• Bone cancer
• Canine
• Lung metastasis
• Metastasis model
• Pulmonary metastasis