Who We Are

The Australian Animal Cancer Foundation's mission is to fight cancer in pets and people by providing best practice veterinary care for animals with cancer, thereby advancing our scientific knowledge of cancer. Animal Cancer Care is one of the few specialist facilities of its kind in the world and the only place in Australia which houses specialists in animal surgical, medical and radiation oncology under the same roof. The Australian Animal Cancer Foundation has the only Linear Accelerator in the southern hemisphere within its own purpose built bunker for animal cancer treatment and research. The foundation has launched a visionary campaign to double the capacity of the treatment facility in order to advance research that will benefit both pets and people with cancer. 

Benefits of Animal Cancer Research

Cancer is the leading cause of pet dog death in this country and second most common cause in cats. And there is a remarkable synergy in human and animal cancer research.

Cancer in animals is very similar to cancer in humans, both in its cause, and in its response to therapy. Internationally renowned animal oncologist, Dr. Stephen Withrow, of the Colorado State University, has observed that some 80% of animal cancers are a "direct correlate" to human cancers.

Dogs, in particular, share our environments and develop many of the same types of cancers found in humans.

Similarly, the treatment of animals with cancer employs the three standard treatments for cancer in humans: surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy.

Increasingly, dogs and cats are playing a role in helping to advance cancer research and Australia is poised to become an international leader in the growing field of animal oncology. Dogs and cats live shorter lives than people and their cancers progress at a proportionately faster rate. This allows results from research into better treatment methods to be realised faster and at a fraction of the cost of clinical trials in people.

Humans are already benefiting from the research findings in animal oncology.

Advances in animal oncology have revolutionised treatment of Osteosarcoma: a type of bone cancer most commonly found in children and young adults. Until recently, the standard surgery was amputation of the limb. There is now a preferable treatment option, thanks to the research of Dr. Withrow and his colleagues at Colorado State University.

These animal oncologists conducted clinical trials with dogs, in which they evaluated different ways of using surgery in conjunction with chemotherapy to treat Osteosarcoma. They also evaluated different surgical techniques for removing the tumours and rebuilding the limb.

Today, treatment options for people with Osteosarcoma include chemotherapy and radiation therapy, along with more advanced surgical options for limb salvage. Many of the current effective limb salvage protocols were developed and refined through research that helped pet dogs with bone cancer keep their legs.

Just as these animal oncologists collaborated with researchers in mainstream cancer research labs to advance human cancer research, The Australian Animal Cancer Foundation’s veterinary specialists collaborate with research scientists at Universities, Human Research Centres and Industry (such as UQ, Premion, QIMR and Engeneic). 

The Edward L. Gillette Memorial Radiation Therapy Unit 

Edward L. GIllette (1932-2006) developed and directed the comparitive oncology unit at Colardo State University publishing over 100 scientific papers and generating over $US20 million in research funding.  Ed is the founding father of veterinary oncology as a discipline and radiation as a speciality.  Ed Trained and inspired many surgical, medical and radiation oncologists as well as radiation biologists, radiation physicists and others.

Ed pioneered veterinary radiation therapy and his inspiration and energy lives on in this facility continuing his wonderful work helping animals and people with cancer live long and happy lives.  This facility is dedicated to his memory.
 

Radiation Therapy Unit

The conventional treatment modalities for cancer are the trilogy of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.

Surgery is the mainstay of most treatments for solid cancers and several specialists in Brisbane practice oncology surgery. Similarly, chemotherapy is available at many referral centres and even general practice. Animal Cancer Care is one of the very few facilities in Australia that provides specialist radiation oncology and the only facility in the southern hemisphere equipped with a high-energy external beam facility (a Linear Accelerator) for the treatment of animals.

It took an investment of $950,000 and more than two years for the Australian Animal Cancer Foundation to design, purchase and build the bunker that houses the high-tech 6-mega volt Linear Accelerator.

The radiation facility is an enormously powerful research and clinical tool with the potential to significantly advance pet animal health and cancer research.

Linear Accelerator

The linear accelerator gives us the opportunity to mimic exactly the radiation therapy currently provided to people with cancer and also to look at novel ways to use and augment the efficacy of radiation by also reducing side effects.

With the Australian Animal Cancer Foundation’s Linear Accelerator (Linac; Siemens MXII 6mV with variable electrons) online, Animal Cancer Care has the single most powerful piece of medical equipment available for animal cancer treatment.

As the only provider of high-energy radiation therapy for animals anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, Animal Cancer Care attracts patients from all Australian states and territories as well as from New Zealand. This high case load provides a large animal cancer database platform which enables the Foundation to work on valuable research projects using spontaneous animal cancer modeling.

Bunker Facts

For the Linac to become operational, the shielding design had to be performed by a nuclear physicist, John Doody from the Mater Hospital. Then the design went to an architectural firm, Archibet, for design and construction. The shielding design called for the primary beam to be shielded by concrete 2 meters thick with 16mm reinforcing steel. The engineers had to calculate the forces and the necessary footings and piles for the enormous weight of this single 20 square meter room. I look on it as a reverse “tardis” of Dr Who fame. It is much larger on the outside than it is on the inside. The walls are enormously thick. Even the roof is 1.8 meters thick of solid reinforced concrete.

Fifty nine concrete trucks delivered their loads of concrete for pumping into the piles, footings, floors, walls and roof of the bunker and there is over $100,000 of reinforcing steel in the concrete. Specially designed and strengthened form work had to be constructed to hold up this huge volume of concrete to ensure it did not just flow out into an enormous concrete lake before it cured. Samples of the concrete were also kept for analysis and testing to show the cured concrete had the prescribed density calculated to block the radiation. This is one solid piece of construction.

Once the bunker was built the 4 tonne Linac had to be craned in through the roof of the adjacent control room with a 100 tonne mobile crane. It was then put on a purpose built dolly and carefully wheeled in through the specially designed concrete maze. It was then accurately attached to the accurately constructed steel base plate embedded in the concrete floor with all the pipes and wires ready to receive the machine. The engineers from OSI skillfully maneuvered the machine with its 2 tonne lead counterweight into position and ensured it was perfectly level and able to pivot and rotate smoothly and accurately on its carefully engineered roller bearings.

All the hydraulics, electrical, oxygen lines, anesthetic scavenge pipe and mechanical conduits had to be specially designed and placed into the construction before the concrete was poured. It is hard to drill a penetration to put in an electrical wire when the wall is 2 meters thick concrete! Also all penetrations had to be on special angles so radiation could not leak out through say an air-conditioning conduit or a water pipe.

The Linac is cooled by a special refrigerator so 3 degree water is constantly circulating through the important elements of the powerful radiation generator. The cooler is kept outside the bunker and the transformers and electrical conditioning devices are housed in a special utility room adjacent to the control room which has its own air-conditioned. The main room of the bunker is air-conditioned continuously maintaining a temperature of 22 degree Celsius and there is also a dehumidifier maintain the exact level of humidity to ensure the circuit boards of the machine are always protected.

The control room has a closed circuit television monitor and our digital computed radiography port film generator. The operators in the control room are further protected by a 1 tonne lead lined automated door. There are fail safe reed switches and many other safety devices to ensure the Linac cannot be turned on if there is any safety hazard to the patient or the operators. There are 5 emergency off buttons in the facility.

Before the Linac could be turned on after the OSI engineers had completed the install, it had to be commissioned. This is where the wonderful team of radiation physicists from Premion came in. They brought in their $400,000 water phantom and associated ion chambers and computer hardware with very sophisticated soft ware to commission the machine and collect data about the beam to provide information down the track to radiation planning programs so animals can be irradiated accurately and safely. The Premion physicists’ first task was to show to Queensland Health that the $700,000 concrete bunker did in fact contain the six million volts of photon radiation. So they drew grid lines all over the bunker and pointed the beam at the centre of each small grid square, ran up the machine to full power and measured the radiation on the outside of the building. Our bunker passed its certification! The commissioning took about 2 months and hours and hours of physics time tweaking the beam and collecting data for all the energies of electrons and photon the device can produce plus looking at the wedges and electron cones available. Premion kindly helped us out with electron and photon blocks for us to help us design intricate fields to treat our animal cancers. The physicists did a fantastic job. We perform daily quality assurance with our own instrumentation, monthly quality assurance with the Premion Physicists as well as more intense three monthly and annual calibrations.

The instrument is now humming along beautifully. She has been named "K-9" and is lovingly cared for daily by our radiation therapist and our radiation oncologist. We have special moulages so we can do CT simulation to allow three dimensional treatment planning and we can do so many wonderful things now to help animals with cancer and to learn so much more how to better treat and manage both animals and people with malignant disease.

Tyson CT Scanner

The CT scanner allows us to identify and measure cancer in a three dimensional sense for early diagnosis, accurate evaluation of research treatment responses, and cancer spread, and to allow us to more accurately irradiate cancers with the linear accelerator with conventional and novel methods.