Involving people to treat their pet with current medicine looks like borderline impossible. If people think their dog will suffer they will skip that.
And research funding is probably conservative, since mice is the 'less bad' idea, money flow this way. Some competition may help changing habits.
Re:A Cancer ‘Moonshot’ Needs Big Data
by danieltillett on Friday January 15, 2016 @07:05PM
(#10913316)
There pet is already suffering - it has cancer after all. The alternative in most cases is to put the dog down.
More importantly this question has already been asked by researchers and most people are happy for their pets to participate in such trials especially when they know they are really helping cure cancer.
The best suggestion I have seen is to make better use of all the millions of pets we have. Dogs and cats get cancer that is very similar to human cancer (much more so than mice) and these are all natural cancers. We need to encourage people to sign up their pets for cancer treatment and conduct many more trials in pets. The fact that we don’t do this at any scale is a sign that we are not too serious about curing cancer.