Veterinary cancer care is one of the fastest growing areas of veterinary medicine in the UK. In a mirror of human medicine our patients are living longer and numerically we are seeing an ever increasing number of oncology cases.

Statistically of 10 year old dogs and 12 year old cats approximately 45% of individuals will have some form of neoplastic disease developing. This may not be clinically significant and it may only ever be known about at necropsy.

The treatment of cancer is very specialised and requires a different outlook and approach from virtually any other aspect of veterinary medicine. The principal aim of veterinary care of the cancer patient must be the quality of life for the patient and the veterinary oncologist must never lose site of this fact.

About The Cancer Treatment Unit
One of the features of these developments has been the creation of units in many countries which are dedicated to the treatment of cancer in pets.
The Cancer Treatment Unit is a small unit in Whitstable, Kent, England dedicated to the development of cancer care in the companion animal and is patient based. We are not primarily a research unit and do not forget that the patient comes first. The maintenance of a good quality of life for our patients is CTU prime aim.

The Cancer Treatment Unit(CTU) offer advisory services to veterinary surgeons throughout the world by preparing Case Assessment Reports. We provide direct referral services for the treatment of the cancer patient. In particular we are developing techniques of brachytherapy for the treatment of some forms of cancer in companion animals.


What is pet cancer?
In very general terms every kilogram of pet animal is composed of about 200,000,000,000 cells and it is more remarkable that normality prevails rather than abnormality. In healthy tissues the rate and frequency of cell division is carefully regulated both within each cell and by the interrelationship between cells. There are substantial safeguards built into the system to ensure that every cell division continues faultlessly. Only when these safeguards fail to work does a cancer start. The genetic material is held in the DNA structures of each cell.

The genes effectively produce a range of proteins into the cell which regulate how that cell works. There is a complicated system by which individual genes are turned on and off so that there is a regulation of the cell metabolism. This whole complicated system can be likened to a factory with each department producing, or not producing, components for the final product, for example, a car. When everything works properly the end product is perfect, if some of the departments produce too much or too little the car might have seven wheels and no seats or two boots but no engine! The safeguards built into cell function try to ensure that each product of the cell is in the correct proportion and that when the cell divides the two daughter cells are similarly perfect.