Good day. Dominic Barfield here, and this is the RVC clinical podcast. Thank you for listening

and thank you for subscribing on your smartphone or generic fruit-based device. And we're really

grateful for you taking the time to download and listen to this obviously podcast. We don't ask

for much in return, be incredibly grateful if you get popped Apple podcast, Acast, wherever you listen

to this podcast and leave a review. Obviously, a five-star review would be great, but we really appreciate a few moments for your time to do that. So joining Brian myself in a, well, I'm actually in the studio,

which is a bit weird, but virtually, as it would be Dr. Andy Yale, who's one of our

lecturers here in veterinary oncology at the RBC. Thank you, Andy, for joining us.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

And Andy's fresh off as a newly qualified European specialist in veterinary oncology. Is that the right time? Yep, spot on. Very good. So congratulations to you, Andy. And I thought what we would talk about would be

canine cutaneous mast cell tumours. And thank you for kindly agreeing and thinking it was a good

topic. I don't often get that response from people. But normally they run away from me when I,

when I approach them. But thank you very much. So maybe if we get started, so could you maybe just run through what,

what are Marcel tumors please? And why do we think they develop? So Marcell tumours,

they're, you know, one of the most common, or they are the most common

cutaneous tumour in dogs, and I'm sure most vets will have come across them.

Essentially, they are tumours that arise from mast cells, as the name implies,

and these are normally cells that are part of the immune system involved in the allergic response.

And essentially, these normal mass cells will become neoplastic and proliferate and form a tumor.

We don't fully understand why that happens.

Generally speaking, cancer is a genetic disease. So it's

something that will develop from accumulations and mutations. And one of the key mutations

that we do know about in mass cell tumours is to do with the C-KIT gene. And this is essentially an oncogene that when mutated, drives cell proliferation.

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