When Cory Padilla felt the lymph nodes in his dog Copper’s neck swell, he knew it was time to take his best friend to the vet. Padilla told The Daily Beast that Copper, a beagle-German shepherd mix, also suffered from diarrhea and his eyes looked “droopy,” but the cancer was not visible to pet owners. He said he didn’t stay.
“I thought it might be another disease that hounds get,” Padilla said. But veterinarians confirmed what pet parents feared most after suctioning Copper’s swollen lymph nodes and diagnosing lymphoma, one of the most common cancers in dogs.
“My heart hit the floor,” Padilla said. It was natural for him to be worried. If canine lymphoma is left untreated, most dogs will die within 3 to 4 weeks.
Padilla quickly went online to learn everything she could about the disease and treatment options. There, he discovered ImpriMed, a company founded in 2017 that uses artificial intelligence and comprehensive analysis of living cancer cells to make AI-based personalized drug response predictions for dogs with lymphoma.
Collie Padilla’s dog, Copper.
Provided by Corey Padilla
Once ImpriMed receives live cancer cells in its California laboratory, it uses flow cytometry testing, a technique that helps veterinarians distinguish between lymphoma subtypes, cell analysis, and commonly used treatments. It will be possible to conduct a drug susceptibility test that ranks the 13 anticancer drugs used. lymphoma and leukemia.
“This approach is about more than just choosing the right treatment,” Sungwon Lim, CEO and co-founder of Imprimed, told The Daily Beast. “It’s also important to avoid spending on treatments that may not be effective for your pet’s specific cancer. In the long run, this will save you both time and money, eliminating the trial and error that comes with cancer treatment. process may be alleviated.”
Lim said Imprimed’s predictions are made using proprietary AI that relies on treatment efficacy results collected from patients nationwide and data extracted from living cancer cells, allowing customers and veterinarians to make their own predictions. He explains that it can provide personalized drug response predictions for dogs.
“I thought it was amazing that the AI took the photos.” [the cancer] “We explained to the panel what chemotherapy would be best and most effective for each individual dog at a cellular level,” Padilla said.
“I thought I was going to kill her.”
Canine lymphoma is traditionally treated with chemotherapy using a protocol called CHOP, which combines four drugs: doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, vincristine, and prednisone.
“We know that 90 to 95 percent of dogs respond to CHOP, and the literature clearly shows that CHOP should be the gold standard of treatment,” said Fairfax, Virginia-based says Jack O’Day, a veterinary oncologist who uses Imprimed. He told The Daily Beast that he is grateful for the precision treatment in his practice.
However, it’s not perfect. CHOP does not take into account the uniqueness of each patient or the wallet of the patient owner. Treatment costs range from $10,000 to $25,000, but not all dogs respond the same way to this protocol. “I wanted to do CHOP, but we were talking about an average of $500 to $600 a week,” Padilla said. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
That’s the beauty of ImpriMed’s services. This provided Padilla with insight into the types of copper lymphoma and allowed him to rank drug options in order of effectiveness.
“If you know what works best, you can make decisions based on that, rather than throwing darts in the dark,” Padilla said, adding that the time and money it takes to treat copper He added that he was able to save both.
ImpriMed, while promising, does not come without its own costs. On average, the Imprimed Predictive Profile, part of the test that ranks cancer drugs, costs pet owners $1,000 to $1,500. That can be cost-prohibitive for many dog owners.
Mr Lim said their services were provided to veterinary hospitals at a “set price”. However, the final cost is ultimately determined by each clinic.
Another pet owner in Texas, Susie Araiza, told The Daily Beast that she didn’t find the Imprimed predictive profile particularly helpful when deciding on treatment options after her dog Precious experienced a recurrence of lymphoma. . For example, the first medication Imprimed recommended made Precious so anemic that she required an emergency iron injection from a veterinarian.
Susie Araiza’s dog Precious.
Provided by Susie Araiza
“We took her out and she went back to normal,” Araiza said. “So for me, even as I was evaluating (her panel test results), I thought it was strange that her first medication…she couldn’t take.”
Araiza said her dog was hospitalized for more than a week because of doxorubicin, another top drug recommended by Precious’s Imprimed board. In the end, she said, she would rather have spent the money on the panel on treatment.
“I thought she was going to die,” Araiza recalled. “The oncologists said, ‘We’ll probably never give her that again.'”
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Araiza’s experience, and that of other pet owners who have detailed their experiences on social media groups dedicated to canine lymphoma, is that “this panel does not evaluate efficacy without looking at the complete clinical picture of the animal.” The question arises, “Will I be able to perform?”
Veterinary oncologist Daniela Kolek told The Daily Beast that she primarily uses Imprimed in her practice for flow cytometry (an advanced type of cell analysis) rather than predictive drug panels. . “You know what’s coming back. [on the Prediction Profiles] “And I think it’s important to point out that from what we know from testing these drugs so often, there’s still a lot of predictive power for lymphoma,” she said.
Korec said that none of her patients have had a predictive profile done with ImpriMed, but that the owner, in addition to the information provided in the report, considers her expertise as the clinician treating the animal. He added that he supports the technology, noting that there are
veterinary oncologist Daniela Kolek;
Provided by Daniela Kollek
Parminder Basran, a medical physicist and associate research professor at Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine, also cautioned against relying solely on AI to guide the trajectory of patient care, especially when it comes to broad topics like cancer.
“These difficult questions are best addressed by medical veterinary professionals, not AI systems,” Basran, whose lab studies the use of AI in veterinary medicine, told The Daily Beast. Ta.
Basran says that the use of AI models in veterinary medicine is “exciting and certainly very interesting,” but that there is “a lot of work to be done” when it comes to trusting AI systems in both veterinary medicine and human medicine. I admit that there are many.
While pet owners, veterinary oncologists, and medical AI experts have mixed confidence in ImpriMed’s predictions, Lim acknowledged that challenges can still arise when treating animals. However, I still support his products.
“Unfortunately, some dogs are resistant to all available drugs, so even the drugs predicted to have the highest chance of success still fail to elicit a positive response,” he said. “Furthermore, like all medical tests and AI predictions, our predictions of drug response are sometimes inaccurate.”
But Lim believes the only way to move modern medicine forward is to continually test its limits. That’s why Imprimed’s team uses real-world statistics to determine whether its products can provide clinical benefits in everyday use and leverages post-market clinical studies in research. .
In December 2023, the company published the results of a study that combined data from 60 dogs treated individually across the country. As a result, patients treated with high agreement with Implemented’s AI predictions were three times more likely to survive and four times more likely to achieve complete remission. This is news that excites Lim.
For the first time, pet owners and veterinarians have a tool that can potentially target specific cancers in animals by creating a panel of AI-predicted effective drugs. But there is work to be done when it comes to both accessibility and accuracy.
While it is tempting for many pet owners to treat their dog’s disease, let alone splurge on predictive AI technology, the research that advances cancer and curative treatments comes at a price, and may never become a reality. It will not be. But still, when it comes to pets, there is nothing many of us wouldn’t do to help them.
Mr. Lim further added, “Our goal is to support veterinarians and their customers with the best tools to fight cancer in their beloved pets.”
