Comparative oncology / research surface

Bladder cancer: the dog as a natural model of human disease.

Naturally-occurring canine invasive urothelial carcinoma (also called invasive transitional cell carcinoma) is a recognized model of human invasive bladder cancer, similar in how it looks and how it behaves. There is an honest twist worth stating plainly: the gene that drives it in dogs is not the one that drives it in people. Below is the canine somatic driver, cited, with that divergence made explicit. These are somatic tumor alterations reported as cohort frequencies, a portrait of the disease across dogs, never a germline carrier status and never an individual-dog prediction.

These are somatic tumor alterations, not a germline carrier status. Every number here is a cohort frequency, the fraction of sequenced tumors somatically altered in a gene, reported by a published study. It is not a variant a dog inherits or carries, and it is not a prediction about any individual dog. Cross-species labels (concordant, divergent, canine-enriched) come from a commensurability-gated concordance map (INV-81), not a coarse shared flag.

This is the molecular driver landscape for this cancer. all cancers →

Where dog and human diverge

divergent · 1

Both sides characterized for a commensurable lesion, and they disagree. The honest limit of the model, not darkness and not a missing rate filled with zero.

BRAF divergent

the singular canine bladder-cancer driver; V595E is the homolog of human V600E and locks the MAPK pathway on. The honest divergence: V600E is <1% of HUMAN bladder cancer, so canine InvTCC models the human disease at the histologic and clinical level, not through a shared driver

Dog

87.9%

of 66 tumors · V595E activating hotspot mutation (homolog of human V600E)

Decker et al. 2015

Human

—

see cited basis

Dog (cited): 87.9% BRAF V595E in canine invasive urothelial carcinoma (Decker 2015)

Human (cited): <1% BRAF V600E in human bladder cancer (Decker 2015)

Same gene, same cancer, both sides measured in one study; the canine tumor is BRAF/MAPK-driven where the human is not. The signature honest divergence.

BRAF V600E occurs in <1% of human bladder cancers (Decker 2015). Canine BRAF-driven InvTCC is instead a natural model for BRAF/MAPK-activated cancer generally, and a disease-level model of human invasive urothelial carcinoma.

fused signature constraint LOEUF 0.237 ortholog high-corroborated