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Around Christmas 2010, University of Minnesota researcher Mark Suckow received terrible news: his family’s twelve-and-a-half-year-old Labrador retriever, Sadie, had squamous cell carcinoma that the vet deemed fatal. But Suckow’s children refused to accept that outcome—their father, after all, was both a trained veterinarian and an expert on tissue-based cancer vaccines. Couldn’t he make one for Sadie? Although his research was in rodent models, he agreed to give it a try. Using a harvested bit of Sadie’s tumor, he created a vaccine by breaking the tumor down into individual cells, inactivating them with a fixative, and mixing them with a bulking agent. Within a couple of weeks—soon after Sadie was injected with the second dose—the tumor stopped spreading and began to shrink. Sadie survived nearly three ...
