For anyone whose life has been touched by cancer, and that’s most people, any advancement in treating the disease provides hope and is welcome news. A new tool that helps in the treatment of osteosarcoma [3] is a result of Stan Stearns’s desire to help other dogs like his St. Bernard Gabriel. Gabriel was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, and succumbed to the disease in 2008.

Stearns is an entrepreneur whose company, Valco Instruments [4], makes tiny tools used for precision work in laboratories. He developed a small drill that can be used to deliver a tiny quantity of a radioactive isotope to a dog’s tumor. This allows doctors to target the tumor accurately without causing harm to healthy cells or subjecting the entire body to chemotherapy. Preliminary results suggest that this treatment alleviates pain and limits the spread of the cancer.

Radioactive isotope therapy is a newer treatment for osteosarcoma, which is often treated by amputating an affected leg, though the cancer still often spreads to the lungs, at which point it’s difficult for the dog to survive more than a year. Treatment for dogs can be $6,000, and Stearns’s Foundation, the Gabriel Institute [5], has paid the costs for some families.

The goal of the Gabriel Institute is to conduct and support research into bone cancer with the hope of finding a cure. Though the institute focuses on dogs, the hope is that the research will benefit people with bone cancer as well.