ข่าววิชาการ-วิจัย-สัมมนา

Dr. Tanakamol Mahawan's team compared tumors from 186 dogs and 142 people without collecting a single new sample, and found 11 genes the two species share.

Dr. Tanakamol Mahawan, a lecturer at Akkhraratchakumari Veterinary College, Walailak University, has received an outstanding research award for emerging researchers in the health sciences, presented at Walailak Research Day 2026 on September 15.

The award recognizes a study of osteosarcoma, the most common bone cancer in both dogs and people. Using computers to sift through medical data that already existed, Dr. Tanakamol and his colleagues found a small group of genes that behave almost identically in the two species, including one that is nearly a perfect match.

The research, published this year in the journal Research in Veterinary Science, began with a problem familiar to scientists who study cancer in more than one species.

"Osteosarcoma is one of those cancers where the biology lines up closely between dogs and people, the same way it does for some breast and bladder cancers," Dr. Tanakamol said. "In dogs, especially the large breeds, it's common enough that there's a lot of data to work with. In people it's rare, and it mostly strikes children, whose smaller bones simply don't yield much tissue to sample. So the datasets are lopsided."

Doctors have long relied on a blood test called alkaline phosphatase, or ALP, to judge how a bone tumor is behaving. The level rises when bone-building cells are unusually busy. But the test has never been a dependable guide to how a patient will fare, and among the dogs in this study it did not clearly predict how long they lived.

So rather than use the blood test, Dr. Tanakamol's team studied the genes connected to it — roughly 146 of them — to see what they were doing inside the tumor itself. Filtering that list by computer, the researchers narrowed it to the 11 genes that mattered most.

"We didn't take a single new sample from a dog or a person," Dr. Tanakamol said. "Everything already existed in public databases; we just had to ask the right questions of it. That mattered to me — getting more value out of data that already exists, rather than asking more animals or patients to be sampled again."

The team then found the human versions of those 11 genes and tested whether they could reveal which human patients' cancer had spread to other parts of the body and which had not. They checked the results against two separate sets of human cases published by other scientists: 88 patients from a United States National Cancer Institute database of childhood cancers, and 54 from a second public archive. In all, 328 tumors were analyzed across the two species.

Although the 11 genes had been chosen using dog tumors alone, they sorted the human patients correctly more often than chance, and did so consistently in both sets. They were not accurate enough, however, to be used as a test on their own.
Together, the 11 genes do the kinds of jobs that help a cancer travel: withstanding damage inside the cell, breaking through surrounding tissue, hiding from the immune system, and helping stray tumor cells survive in the bloodstream and take root somewhere new.

One gene stood out. KEAP1, which helps tumor cells survive damage from within, proved to be 97.6 percent identical in dogs and humans, the closest match of any gene in the group.

"If a gene is that similar between a dog and a human, there's a real possibility that a drug developed to act on it in one species could work in the other," Dr. Tanakamol said. "That's the promise of targeted therapy here — if we can find a way to block that gene, we may be able to slow the cancer's spread, or stop it altogether."

What is at stake is much the same for both species. Once osteosarcoma spreads, usually to the lungs, it is nearly always fatal, and many patients, dogs and people alike, lose a limb to amputation before that happens. Slowing the spread, Dr. Tanakamol said, could mean longer lives and, in some cases, no amputation at all.

He is careful to call the findings an early step. The work was done entirely on computers, and the 11 genes have not yet been tested in a laboratory or on patients. Proving they matter would take years of further work, first in the lab, then in animals, and only then in people. Dr. Tanakamol said he is in talks with the Faculty of Veterinary Science at Chulalongkorn University about that next stage.

The study was funded by Walailak University's New Researcher Development scheme, a grant he received in his first year at the university. His co-authors are Dr. Noppason Pangprasit and Associate Professor Dr. Sukanya Thongratsakul at Walailak University, and Putri Krishna Kumara Dewi in Bali, Indonesia.

The award was one of nine given to emerging researchers at Walailak Research Day 2026, across the humanities and social sciences, health sciences, and science and technology. The event, held at Walailak University Hospital, was opened by Dr. Wiparat De-ong, Executive Director of Thailand's National Research Council, and featured work from the university's centers of excellence, Science and Technology Park, and Fundamental Fund highlights.