“If you ask most experts in the cancer community, creating a wide-ranging vaccine that prevents tumours like we prevent infectious diseases is damn near impossible.” However, Stephen Johnston says that “if the chance is 10% that it might work, I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t take that chance.” Johnston is not an oncologist. He is an scientist and inventor, and director of Arizona State University’s Centre for Innovations in Medicine,” but he has launched a trial with dogs across the United States, and he is collaborating with Doug Thamm, a cancer survivor himself, who is the director of clinical research at Colorado State University’s Flint Animal Cancer Centre. “Cancer is actually the leading cause of death in adult dogs,” Thamm says. “They develop these tumours spontaneously as a result of old age in a way that’s very, very similar to the way humans do.” Thamm and Johnston have decided to undertake an interventional clinical trial, and it is called “Vaccination Against Canine Cancer Study.” Learn more about it here: