Precision Medicine in Veterinary Oncology

Precision medicine is transforming the landscape of cancer diagnosis and management by enabling earlier detection, improved risk stratification, and real-time monitoring of disease. In human oncology, liquid biopsy approaches—particularly those leveraging circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA)—have rapidly advanced from research tools to clinically actionable diagnostics. These technologies offer minimally invasive alternatives to traditional tissue biopsies and provide dynamic insights into tumor evolution, treatment response, and minimal residual disease.

In veterinary oncology, however, the integration of precision medicine has lagged behind, in part due to limited availability of scalable, affordable, and validated diagnostic platforms. This session will provide an overview of the current state of liquid biopsy in veterinary medicine, highlighting key technological advances, clinical applications, and translational opportunities. Particular emphasis will be placed on the challenges unique to veterinary patients, including tumor heterogeneity across breeds, limited genomic annotation, and barriers to clinical implementation.

The presentation will then focus on the development and application of a novel blood-based cancer detection platform, the UW CancerK9 test. This assay utilizes cell-free DNA (cfDNA) profiling to detect cancer-associated genomic alterations across multiple tumor types. We will discuss assay design, analytical performance, and emerging data from ongoing prospective studies evaluating its clinical utility in canine patients. Preliminary findings suggest promising performance characteristics, with the potential to achieve high specificity while maintaining broad applicability across tumor histologies.

Finally, this session will explore how liquid biopsy technologies can be integrated into routine veterinary practice, including applications in early cancer detection, disease monitoring, and guiding therapeutic decision-making. The broader implications for comparative oncology and bidirectional translation between human and veterinary medicine will also be discussed.

This session is designed for veterinarians, clinicians, researchers, and trainees interested in the future of precision oncology and its practical implementation in veterinary medicine.