By Stacey DeLoye
When man’s best friend develops cancer, veterinarians often use human medications to treat them, because dogs and humans share deep biological similarities. This creates an opportunity for both species to help each other, through comparative studies, said Elizabeth Maxwell, D.V.M., a surgical oncologist at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine.
Maxwell has teamed up with the robotic drug discovery group at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology on studies of the aggressive skin cancer melanoma, and a type of bone cancer that’s rare in humans, but more common in dogs, called osteosarcoma.
“By comparing drug responses across canine and human cancer cell lines, we can identify shared therapeutic strategies that will benefit both species,” said Maxwell, a member of the UF Health Cancer Institute’s Cancer Targeting and Therapeutics research program.
Maxwell’s proposal is one of 18 selected for the Cancer High Throughput Screening Drug Discovery Initiative underway at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute, in partnership with the UF Health Cancer Institute. Sharing UF grant support of $340,000, UF scientists are teaming up with experts at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute to target cancer’s biological mysteries and seek potential drug leads for many cancer types. Projects underway address cancers caused by viruses, leukemia, breast, lung, skin, bone, head, neck, colorectal cancers and more.
Sharing UF grant support of $340,000, UF scientists are teaming up with experts at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute to target cancer’s biological mysteries and seek potential drug leads for many cancer types.
Rolf Renne, Ph.D., associate director for basic sciences at the UF Health Cancer Institute, said the initiative enables cancer investigators to access a unique, world-class small-molecule screening facility. Small molecules have drug-like properties that make them potentially useful medicines.
“I cannot wait to learn about the potential impact on cancer treatment the initiative will have in the future,” he said.
The institute’s robotic group in Jupiter is an exciting place. Engineers place trays selected from more than 650,000 compounds into 6-foot-tall carousels. They pull from the National Cancer Institute’s specialty oncology collection; a drug repurposing set; natural products and Chinese medicine collections; anti-parasitics; antivirals; antibiotics, and neuroscience-focused collections. Nearby, robot arms whir, moving trays of miniaturized test tubes among stations that dose, incubate and read results.
The robotics group is part of a continuum of advanced drug-discovery capabilities at the institute.
Joining the projects are scientists with pharmaceutical and biotech industry experience. With so much expertise and technology, the Cancer High Throughput Screening Drug Discovery Initiative gives scientists an extraordinary opportunity to both discover new disease biology and find potential treatments, said Timothy Spicer, Ph.D., co-director of the robotic High-Throughput Molecular Screening Center at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute and co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Institute’s Cancer Targeting and Therapeutics research program.
In 2026, UF added a suite of state-of-the-art robots and detection technologies to the center, Spicer said. They allow the system to track many indicators at once, including fluorescence, protein location and cell shape.
The system can screen up to 1 million wells a day. Spicer, along with center co-senior director Louis Scampavia, Ph.D., and their team, help researchers adapt their experiments for this setting. With Maxwell, the team selected a three-dimensional, spheroid-based test system that uses tumor cells from much-loved canine patients, as well as human cancer cell lines. The researchers culture the cells to grow around beads to simulate tumor architecture. Luminescence serves as the readout: If tagged cancer cells light up after compound incubation, they remain alive, and the compounds failed. Dark wells indicate success.
“The team at Scripps was amazing to work with and was so responsive, helpful and collaborative in helping us execute our project in a very short timeframe,” Maxwell said.
“We identified both overlapping and distinct drug sensitivities across canine and human models. In osteosarcoma, 13 compounds were active across all species models, while melanoma models demonstrated 19 overlapping active compounds,” Maxwell said.
Research at this scale might take a human years to complete with a pipette, Spicer said. The drug discovery capability makes the UF Heath Cancer Institute unique among cancer centers, he said.
“Of the 73 cancer centers designated by the NCI across the country, I believe we are the only ones that have this technology,” Spicer said.
