Canine head and neck cancer as a spontaneous, translational model for radio-immunology research

The baseline immune landscape of spontaneous canine HNSCC tumors was asssessed using immunohistochemistry and nanostring gene expression profiling of 34 canine oral carcinoma tumors and two normal oral mucosal tissue samples. Formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue samples from 33 dogs were analyzed, which included 34 tumor samples and 2 normal mucosal samples, with one dog providing both tumor and normal mucosal samples. Samples were anlayzed by immunohistochemistry for CD3, FoxP3, CD204, and CD79a. RNA was extracted for nanostring gene expression profiling using a custom designed panel of canine specific probes for 48 immune genes based on those published by Rooney et al. (2015).