Science Friday - It’s Hot. But How Hot? | Canine Cancer Vaccine Shows Promising Results

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Researchers say the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature is a better indicator of heat stress. Also, cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs. A new vaccine has increased survival rates in clinical trials, offering hope for dogs and humans.Yes, It’s Hot. But How Hot?Much of the country has been enduring a heat wave this week, with millions sweating from Maine to the Midwest. But describing exactly how hot it is—and when temperatures become hazardous—can be challenging. Beyond the basic temperature, there’s the heat index, invented in 1978, which incorporates humidity measurements and is supposed to give a better indication of how a person might feel outside. Some health researchers are calling for more attention to a different type of temperature measurement known as the wet bulb globe temperature. It tracks temperature, humidity, and sunlight, and improves upon the heat index standard.Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, joins SciFri’s Kathleen Davis to talk about measuring temperatures and protecting yourself from extreme heat. Plus, they discuss other stories from the week in science, including advances in tornado prediction, a delay in a return flight from the International Space Station, and a newly-described horned dinosaur that once roamed the US.A Canine Cancer Vaccine Shows Promising ResultsDogs are by far the most popular pet in the United States: 62 million households have at least one. They are humans’ best friends, after all. Sadly, cancer is the leading cause of death in domestic dogs. And when a pet gets sick, it can be devastating for the entire family.Lucky for dogs (and their people), there may soon be a breakthrough in treating canine cancer: a vaccine that can slow and even stop the spread of tumors. Clinical trial results are quite promising so far, increasing 12-month survival rates in dogs with some cancers from 35% to 60%. The research team also reports that in many dogs the vaccine shrinks tumors.Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about this novel therapy is Dr. Mark Mamula, professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Mamula discusses this important breakthrough, and possible future applications for human cancer therapies.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Could a new treatment help our four-legged friends live longer? A number of dogs have lived two, three, or four years after receiving our therapy. It's Friday, June 21st, better known as Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Dee Petershmit. Cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs. The numbers are staggering. Half of dogs over 10 years old will pass from the disease. But luckily, there's a new promising treatment being tested.

We'll talk about that story in just a bit. But first, here's Kathleen Davis, with the biggest science stories of the week. You don't need me to tell you that it is hot outside. People along the East Coast and deep into the Midwest have been enduring a heat wave, sticky, sweaty, and gross. And while you can look at your trusty thermometer or check the heat index,

is there a better way to keep track of summertime heat stress? Well, joining me now to talk about it is Umer Erfahn, senior correspondent at Vox in Washington, D.C., Welcome back, Umair. Hello, Kathleen. So tell us about this other temperature measurement that we could be using. Is this a better heat index? Well, according to a lot of people that use it, yes, this is probably the most effective way of assessing heat damage to the body.

And this was actually a measurement developed by the U.S. military in the 1950s. It's known as the wet bulb globe temperature. And what it does is it accounts, one, for air temperature, but also for humidity and how well sweat. evaporates from the body as well as sunlight exposure. So it incorporates three or four different measurements into one number and tells you more accurately the threshold at which the human body starts to experience danger. The danger limit under the wet bulb globe temperature is usually considered to be about 95 degrees Fahrenheit. And after six hours or so, that's considered to be extremely dangerous. I have to say wet bulb globe temperature doesn't really roll off the tongue,

but I digress. Is this something that I can measure myself, or do I need like a special thermometer for this? Well, the measurement devices actually incorporate these three or four different measurements together. So one, it is a conventional thermometer, but it also has a thermometer inside a black globe, essentially, to serve as a proxy for exposure to sunlight. That's the globe.

And then the wet bulb is a thermometer that's wrapped in a wet cloth. And what that does is it shows basically as long as the cloth is wet, it means that sweat or it means that water is not evaporating. And if that gets way too hot, then that means that your body cannot sweat effectively. It takes in more energy from the surroundings than it can dissipate. And that can lead to complications like heat exhaustion and then later heat stroke. Is this being used by anyone right now? It's used by a lot of sporting teams.

You know, there's a lot of high school and college athletics associations that use the wet bulb globe temperature as a threshold for whether or not they're going to have outdoor activities. The military uses this as well. They usually consider wet bulb globe temperatures above 90 degrees to be considered black flag temperatures. But this is not something that's widely reported. It's also not something that's talked about in the news. And a lot of employers don't really pay attention to this, like, you know, farm workers and other kinds of job sites where you have people being outside. They typically rely on just the temperature or the heat index, which doesn't tell the full story about the risks that the people working outside will face. Right. Like if I'm going out

expecting it to be 80 degrees, but then it feels a lot more like 95. I mean, that's going to put a stress on my body that I wasn't expecting. Yeah, that's right. And part of the challenge here is that while any individual metric is going to be covering over a wide area, the way we individually experience stresses from heat can vary a lot person to person. So your threshold for heat exposure can be very different from mine, even under the same conditions, especially if you're taking some kinds of medicines, if you're an older adult, if you're a very young child, and other kinds of factors, how much cumulative exposure you've had, all of these other factors also play a risk in how quickly you can succumb to the heat. Okay, let's talk about some other weather news. This has been a

really busy season for tornadoes. Do we know why this is? There appear to be a few different factors at work. You know, tornadoes are very mercurial. They spool up very quickly. And from an atmosphere's perspective, you know, they're very small. But it appears that there are some other factors globally that are playing a role in the current round of tornadoes, including the rash of tornadoes we saw over Memorial Day weekend. One big factor that appears to be at work is this switch from El Nino to La Nina in the Pacific Ocean. This is the warming pattern at the surface of the Pacific Ocean. And it starts to shift the jet stream over the United States.

and it starts to lead to atmospheric instability that allows tornadoes to form a little bit more readily. There are other kinds of ocean patterns that are emerging from the Indian Ocean. This is a pattern known as the Madin-Julian oscillation. That's sending waves of disruption over to the United States. That's also leading to increased tornado activity. Plus, it's been really hot in Central America and over Mexico, and that's led to more moisture in the atmosphere. And that moisture helps fuel thunderstorms that can then spawn tornadoes. Is there anything that we can do to better predict tornadoes?

Well, scientists say that they've actually been making a lot of progress in getting ahead of tornadoes. Right now, most tornado warnings, you get them on the order of minutes, maybe 10 minutes, sometimes even less. But there are warning signs that clusters of tornadoes might be emerging, you know, days in advance. And scientists have started to pick up on them, one, by studying historical data, but also by using machine learning models that can actually detect trends and patterns that scientists. previously could not pick up on. And in fact, they're using these forecasting models and testing them out right now at the Storm Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. These machine learning models can actually anticipate storms that could lead to tornadoes up to a week in advance. You know, it can't really tell you whether your house is in danger, but it can help airlines reroute

traffic. It can help emergency responders make sure they have line crews ready to do repairs and also muster resources to deal with the aftermath. And so there's a lot of ways you can make that Yeah, it sounds like that could be a big deal. So let's shift gears here to some positive environmental news. It turns out some of the land near the Chernobyl nuclear site might actually be getting safer. Is that right? Right. The scientists who have been studying this area for a long time in Ukraine, this week they've reported that the radiation levels around the further reaches of the exclusion zone or some of the areas that were contaminated after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. have fallen below the dangerous thresholds, that basically it's now within the safe limits for farming. And this is a huge bit of progress for the people who live in the region who rely on this land. But it just shows, though, also how long it can take for this kind of contamination to fade away, that this has been a nearly 40-year-long process waiting.

Now there are other complications that have emerged around this as well. Basically, there's still the stigma of food that's grown in these radiation zones. and people here want to export that food, particularly since Ukraine lost a lot of farmland during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they want to use this to compensate that and to bolster their export capacity, but they want to also convince their customers that this food that they're growing on this land is safe. Yeah, that seems like a big hurdle. So let's get back a little bit closer to home. So we've all heard a lot over the past few years about weight loss drugs and their use in adults.

But there are other interventions that are now being recommended for, kids. Can you kind of walk me through what's being discussed here? Right. So roughly between one in five and one in six children in the U.S. are classified as obese and that's considered being in the 95th percentile or above for their body mass index given their age and sex. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, this is an independent body of experts that analyzes research and advises the government. They're now recommending that intensive behavioral intervention should be used for kids who are six years age and older. Basically, the idea is that kids should be receiving things like counseling, education, and supervised exercise as a way to deal with obesity.

And they found that the evidence shows that this does bear out that basically roughly around 26 hours of counseling and supervision leads to measurable and sustained weight loss. So before this, was there any sort of counseling intervention being done? There was on an ad hoc basis, but it was not a recommendation. This group basically was looking at what the evidence shows of what actually works. Now they say that there is actually a body of evidence that shows that counseling can be very effective for children. And this sounds like this would be a lot less invasive than maybe some of these weight loss drugs that are being used in adults, right?

Right. And that is part of the advantage here as well. The task force says that they did look into using these GLP1 agonists like Ozempic and their effects on children but said that the evidence wasn't quite there yet and there isn't enough research to issue any kind of recommendation one way or another. But counseling seems to be a very low stakes way of creating some meaningful gains here. And now that's why it's the new default. So let's shift gears again and head to space actually. So over the past few weeks, we've talked about the challenges of getting Boeing's starliner spacecraft off the ground. And now that

it's at the International Space Station, there may be another glitch. Right. So the two astronauts, who arrived at the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner. They arrived on June 6th and they were only supposed to stay for about a week, but this week, NASA says that they'll be there at least until June 26th. And that's because they want to try to figure out what went wrong during the trip there. Basically, on the way to the spacecraft, they experienced helium leaks and they saw thrusters malfunction. And the engineers are trying to troubleshoot and figure out what went wrong in order to make sure that the next trips there go safely. Now, they say that, the spacecraft is safe, that it's perfectly capable of taking the astronauts home. It's just that the

parts that were malfunctioning are on parts of the spacecraft that are considered disposable or parts that would be damaged or destroyed during reentry by design. And so this is their last chance to try to figure out and examine these parts and see if they can figure out what went wrong. Well, that sounds like my personal nightmare. So I hope that they figure that out and get them back home safely. Finally, we have one last story that I'm very, excited to talk about. There is a new flashy dinosaur in town, it sounds like. Right. So scientists just this week have declared that there's a new dinosaur called Loki Seratops. It's a herbivore. It lived in the swamps and floodplains of Montana about 78 million years ago.

It's a cousin of the triceratops. But one, it's really big. This is the biggest dinosaur of this family that they've found so far, 22 feet long, weighing about 11,000 pounds. it's also the most flamboyant. That's kind of the description that the scientist. Is that a scientific term? It's not a scientific term, but I mean, they talk about a lot about how many horns and how ornate its crest was. This is a dinosaur that had two asymmetrical horns on the side of its frill and more than 20 littler horns around the side of its head. It's very big. And it also indicates, though, that there was a lot more diversity of this family of dinosaurs in the United States in this region millions of years ago.

and also that many of these dinosaurs were living alongside each other. These fossils were originally discovered in 2019, but only recently did they finally, you know, do enough analysis, piecing the parts together to realize that this is actually a new species. So what did they think that it was, like a mutant triceratops or something? I mean, that's a possibility. You know, when you're looking at fossils, you're looking at fragments, and so tend to try to see if they fit into any existing categories

before deciding that they're in a new category. And so it required a little bit more searching and figuring out, you know, like, is this just simply a really, really big triceratops or is this actually a different species entirely? And that's a process that takes a lot of time. And they finally came to the conclusion this week that this is, in fact, something new. Well, that's all the time that we have for now, Umer Erfan, senior correspondent at Vox in Washington, D.C. Thanks again for being with me. My pleasure, Kathleen. Thanks for having me.

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62 million households in the country have at least. one dog. And that's not too surprising. They are humans best friends, after all. Sadly, cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs. When a pet gets sick, it can be devastating for the whole family. So lucky for us, there's been a new breakthrough in treating canine cancer. And this could lead to benefits for us humans, too. Joining me to talk about this new vaccine treatment is my guest, Dr. Mark Mamula, Professor of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me. Happy to be here and happy to discuss our companion animals and more importantly how to keep them potentially

healthier even with diseases like cancer. Yeah, so let's get right into it. How common is canine cancer? Remarkably, about one in four dogs in their lifetime will get cancer at some point in their life. If the dog or a dog is lucky enough to live to 10 years of age, the overall incidence of cancer goes up to about one and two. About half of all dogs will get cancer. I kind of can't believe how staggering that number is. Why is that so high? It really is a staggering number. and of course it is far higher than incidents of cancers in adult humans. The incidents in dogs has several explanations. Among them are cancer genes that are predisposed to various breeds

that may get vertically or transmitted through interbreeding of dogs. That's one popular and in fact scientifically proven notion. It's been postulated that the use of herbicides and pesticides on lawns, for example, where dogs continuously have their nose to, literally their nose to the ground, may enhance the prevalence of cancers as well. Okay, so walk me through how this treatment works. It's a vaccine, right? Well, it's an immunotherapy. Yes, it's two injections of a portion of a protein that is found on the surface of cancer cells. The protein family that is the target of our therapy is known as EGFR or her too. And we have learned through effective human cancer therapies that these are important.

on the surface of tumors that activate tumor cells, get them to grow, get them to multiply, and get them to metastasize. So all to the benefit of cancer, of course, but to the detriment of the dog or the human. So our therapy targets immune responses to these surface proteins that hopefully find the tumors and attached to the tumor cell and block their growth or block their metastasis and help kill the tumor cell. So you're giving this to dogs that already have a cancer diagnosis versus it being a preventative treatment, right?

That's correct. This is a therapeutic immunotherapy that once dogs are diagnosed with certain types of cancers, that they would get this therapy that activates immune responses in a manner somewhat similar to other vaccine responses. For example, humans get vaccinated to a number of pathogens. This is much like that with the difference being that the immune response targets the tumor or proteins on the tumor. So what kind of cancer is this meant for? This is meant for a wide variety, actually, of tumors in dogs that express these EGFR and her two proteins, and they include the more common cancers in dogs, including osteosarcoma and hemangiosarcoma.

Other cancers are included as well that express these proteins, and those can be anal sac carcinoma, certain types of bladder cancers, certain types of lung cancers, soft tissue sarcomas, of course, breast cancer, which is found in dogs as well, as well as colon cancer. So really a large number of solid tumors that are found in dogs do express these tumor proteins. What kind of efficacy rates are you finding in the trials that you've done so far? Well, we've had recent trials ongoing for about the past year and a half, and those were preceded by an open label trial about three or four years ago now, actually. And we found, interestingly, that dogs that get osteosarcoma and receive our therapy actually have a increased survival rate compared to standard of care. typical standard of care for dogs with osteosarcoma, which is a bone cancer, primarily in the large

bones of the leg. Typical therapy for dogs that have this kind of cancer is amputation of the infected limb. Sometimes radiation can be used on the affected limb, but most often it's amputation as a surgical intervention along with chemotherapy. And when we add our immunotherapy to that regimen, it almost doubles the 12-month survival of dogs with osteosarcoma. So with standard of care, the survival of dogs with osteosarcoma is fairly disappointing. Only about 35 or 40% of dogs will survive 12 months.

And as I mentioned, if one adds our immunotherapy to that classical treatment protocol, we get almost 60, 65 percent of survival after 12 months and a number of dogs that have lived two, three, or four years after receiving our therapy. So that's a huge benefit. That's really significant. Significant, yes, significant advances, particularly when, of course, the longevity of dogs, which is anywhere from 8 to 12 or 15 years, the fact that their lives are so short to begin with getting a benefit of one or two or three years is a very significant benefit of a total lifetime in a dog, of course. So I'm sure that there are people who are listening to this who are really interested in getting this treatment for their dogs. Is that even possible for people to get their hands on this at this point? I mean, is there a timeline for that? Well, we have clinical trials ongoing.

And the sites that are utilizing our therapy or performing our clinical trials, there are 10, probably soon to be 11 sites. in this country, one in Canada. One can find the sites that are performing this therapy, and that can be found on a website called Therajan, T-H-E-R-A-J-A-N.com. In full disclosure, this is a company that will ultimately manage this therapy for canine cancers. nonetheless, it will list all of the sites that one can find this therapy. You can contact the clinics directly for details about qualifying for the clinical trial. At the moment, the clinical trial is for use in osteosarcoma,

hemangiocercoma, and bladder cancer, or what's known as transitional cell carcinoma. So again, call the clinics directly, and they'll tell the clinics directly, try and get you in and give you all the qualification details, and it should be just as easy as that. So obviously, this has been really promising for canine cancer, but could this eventually make the jump to a better treatment for human cancer? Another great question. Yes, we actually designed the study with translational applications in mind, and of course the translational application to treating human cancers. We have not yet started clinical trials in human cancers, but hopefully in the coming a few years, I would guess we would initiate similar trials in humans.

And for the same types of cancer, bone cancer, bladder cancer? Yes, humans get slightly different types of cancers that express the proteins that we target. But notably, EGL, F-R and her two on human cancers include gastrointestinal cancers and some breast cancers, again, some lung cancers. Regarding the canine therapy, we are seeking USDA approval for conditional licensing that will allow us, hopefully, widespread distribution of this therapy to locations all around the country. we'll probably start with veterinary oncology offices. But at the moment, the availability is restricted to the clinical trial sites. So one thing that I've gleaned from talking to you today is that you clearly love dogs.

So removing yourself from your role as a researcher on this, I mean, how exciting is this for the dog lovers out there? Oh, my gosh. Well, you're talking to one dog lover. I have two golden retrievers, one that's 11 and a half years old. So cancer is not far from my thought process with my own dogs. In fact, one motivation for our study and studies in treating dog cancers was, in fact, from my own family, we had a Labrador retriever that passed away from an inoperable cancer about 11 or 12 years or so ago. So I do know how important dogs are as companion animals and families.

And many or most families, of course, treat their dogs like they are family, as we did. And I actually was, you know, on the side of the family with a dog with cancer, as well as now on the treatment side of cancers in our dogs. Well, we wish you the best of luck with this work. That is all the time that we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Mark Mamula, Professor of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

That's all the time we have for now. A lot of folks helped make the show happen this week, including... Phyllis Samares. Annie Nero. Jordan Smudjik. Charles Bergquist. And many more. On Monday, we'll talk about what happens when cities fail on their climate goals.

But for now, I'm Cyfry producer Dee Piederschmitt. We'll see you next week.