By Laura Beil
Daisy Martin didn’t seem sick. Come dinnertime, she was as ravenous as ever. And at the sight of a new toy, she danced around in excited circles, same as always. Then one day, when Daisy was 8 years old, one of her family members noticed a lump, and then others, on the side of Daisy’s neck, beneath her fur. The diagnosis was devastating: T-cell lymphoma, a cancer so merciless that Daisy’s family feared losing her within weeks. The one hope was to enroll Daisy in a study of an experimental drug, available more than an hour’s drive away at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. Her family was torn. Would the treatment cause more suffering? Would she lose her hair?
Daisy (pictured below) is a doe-eyed Shih Tzu. As with research volunteers of the human kind, her participation in the drug trial meant she could obtain care that her family could not otherwise afford. She would help scientists collect data that could benefit future generations of ailing dogs, even if she herself could not conquer the cancer.
And the trial reaches beyond canine patients. Whether Daisy recovers, and how she recovers, will provide information about a drug that could one day help dog owners as much as dogs themselves.