Cancer frequently affects our veterinary patients and in recent years chemotherapy has become more commonly utilised treatment. General practices are increasingly prescribing and administering chemotherapy drugs. Chemotherapy drugs are toxic to cells (cytotoxic) interfering with the normal cell life cycle which results in cell death. Cancer cells are targeted by these drugs however they are not specific for cancer cells and healthy tissue can be affected. Chemotherapy drugs are also carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic and abortifacient. It is important that these drugs are handled safely. Personnel handling of chemotherapeutic drugs have been found to have increased risks of infertility, early pregnancy loss or urinary excretion of these drugs. This webinar will discuss the safety precautions necessary for handling chemotherapy agents and will focus on the recent consensus guidelines produced by the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) in January 2018 to raise awareness of risks and how we can reduce the exposure within clinics. If time permits, common side effects (neutropaenia, thorombocytopaenia and gastrointestinal side effects) caused by chemotherapy will be explained as well as precautions for handling such patients.

Tumors are quite frequent in companion animals, with malignant forms representing 56% of all the tumors in dogs and 80% in cats. Predicting the survival time and treatment response for malignant tumors is necessary to evaluate the best care options for the animal. Histological tumor grading helps veterinarians to define the prognosis, but each tumor has its own grading system with different prognosis, in terms of survival rate, metastatic rate, recurrence incidence. It could be not so easy to get your bearings in the pathologic words of gradings. The goal of this seminar is to be able to correlate the validated prognosis to each tumor grading we will see. We will rapidly review what tumor grading is and how it is evaluated. Then we will spend some time to review some of the most important tumor gradings (mammary tumors, mast cell tumors, melanomas, soft tissue sarcomas) and the correlated and validated prognostic factors. At the end of the seminar you will be able to clearly understand your pathologist’s report based on the grading system, and to use it to give an appropriate prognosis to the owners.

Mast cell tumours (MCT) and soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are some of the most common tumours encountered in small animal practice. Although surgical removal is often the most appropriate initial treatment, questions like whether or not to perform staging tests prior to surgery, identification of cases where surgery may not be recommended, treatment options for non-surgical cases, interpretation of prognostic factors and the best approach for follow up can be more challenging. In this webinar we will discuss initial diagnosis of canine MCT and STS, when and which staging tests are appropriate for different cases, interpretation of histopathology reports and grading schemes, and non-surgical treatment options. We will discuss in more depth the use of receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors such as Palladia in canine MCT.