ohmidog!

It has been a year since we last checked in on Batman – around the time researchers at the University of Minnesota began an experimental procedure to save him from an aggressive brain tumor.

The 13-year-old shepherd mix had a form of brain cancer called a glioma — the same type of cancer Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy is battling.

University of Minnesota veterinary surgeon G. Elizabeth Pluhar, who has spent the past year caring for Batman, said last week his tumor seems to have disappeared, according to the Associated Press.

“I don’t see any tumor right now,” she says. “Which is wonderful.”

Gliomas are tricky to treat because they send out little tentacles that infiltrate other parts of the brain, and surgery alone usually isn’t sufficient to cure a glioma.

Researchers from the vet school devised a treatment for Batman that began with surgery, followed by gene therapy and a custom-made, anticancer vaccine designed to boost his immune system.

Researcher John Ohlfest, who helped create the new immune therapies, said the vaccine is made up of dead cancer cells from Batman’s tumor that have been enhanced in a way that makes them much more obvious to the dog’s immune system.

Ohlfest can’t say exactly why the vaccine has worked so well, but his team is trying to figure it out, in hopes the treatment could be used on people someday.

Ohlfest said dogs are a better model for testing brain cancer treatments than rats because they’re big enough to operate on and handle treatment doses that would be comparable to what a human might need.

“The problem is that over 90 percent of cancer therapies that have worked in mice have failed in people,” Ohlfest said. “Not only did they fail, but toxicities that were not observed in mice occurred in people, so it’s double-edged bad news there.”

So far, the university’s experiment seems to be working, and Batman appears in perfect health.

“Being a year out and still having no sign of any tumor, no evidence of disease, is amazing,” she said. “Because I do think that had we done nothing or had we just done surgery that he would not be alive right now.”

Pluhar and Ohlfest have secured funding to treat another 60 to 70 dogs with brain cancer as part of their clinical trial, and they’ve enrolled about a half dozen so far. All of the treatments are free for participating in the research. Normally the treatments would cost up to $20,000.