BRITISH VETERINARY ONCOLOGY STUDY GROUP

Proceedings of Meeting held 12th May 2001

The main theme of the meeting was Oral Tumours and was introduced by an overviews of the incidence, presentation and basic management of this common group of tumours given by Sue Murphy of the Animal Health Trust and Dr Laura Blackwood of the University of Glasgow. These presentations stimulated discussions relating to details of diagnosis, with a call for the renaming of acanthomatous epulis as basal cell carcinoma to reflect its locally malignant behaviour and tissue of origin. The importance of accurate staging before embarking on therapy was stressed and the benefits of MRI scans were clearly shown.

After coffee we were delighted to welcome Mr Keith Webster FRCS a Consultant Facio-maxillary Surgeon from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham for a state of the art paper on management of oral tumours in humans. He described complex reconstructive surgical techniques involving grafting of tissue from remote sites. Micro vascular surgery allows tissue to be excised from the donor site with its artery and vein which can be anastomosed to local vessels in the face in order to provide a vital graft which will heal rapidly and will allow more intense radiotherapy at an earlier post-operative stage than other methods. Some of these operations take up to 14 hours to perform, but the results were very impressive.

The first part of the afternoon was taken up by a case discussion session in which the morning's speakers were joined by Malcolm Brearley and Pru Neath. This was followed by a paper on gene therapy given by Dr David Argyle of the University of Glasgow. The veterinary school is involved in pioneering work in gene therapy and the progress towards targeted therapies was fascinating.

Before the AGM, Malcolm Brearley put forward ideas for a group trial of the effects of Meloxicam in management of various cancers, especially in patients where definitive treatment is not appropriate. It was agreed that we should attempt to formulate a stage 2 clinical trial, but final details would need defining.