Blood-sniffing dogs may become the latest frontier in cancer detection, a new study presented at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting during the 2019 Experimental Biology conference in Orlando, Florida, reveals.
By using their superb sense of smell—which is 10,000 times more accurate than a human’s, therefore making them highly sensitive to odors we can’t perceive—the trained lab dogs were able to pick out blood samples from cancer patients with 97 percent accuracy. Did we even need another reason to call dogs “man’s best friend?”
Heather Junqueira, lead researcher on the study, says the results could lead to canine detection as a low-cost, non-invasive approach to cancer screening and perhaps other diseases. Dogs may also be able to detect cancer earlier than other traditional exams, she added. Electronic systems are chasing the same goal: a Yale-led AI model now predicts how humans perceive scent mixtures, a step toward using odor as a disease biomarker.
Junqueira said, “This work is very exciting because it paves the way for further research along two paths, both of which could lead to new cancer-detection tools. One is using canine scent detection as a screening method for cancers, and the other would be to determine the biologic compounds the dogs detect and then design cancer-screening tests based on those compounds.”
Training
Four beagles were taught to distinguish between healthy blood samples and those from patients with malignant lung cancer by Janqueira and her team at BioScentDx, the lab where the study was performed. One did not cooperate, but the other three dogs were able to identify cancerous samples 96.7 percent of the time.
Current and Future Studies
Now, they are testing whether dogs can smell cancer in the breath condensate of breast cancer patients. The company launched a breast cancer study in which participants donate samples of their breath for screening by trained cancer-sniffing dogs. Next, they plan to isolate the chemical compounds in samples and find out exactly where the odor originates. They are quite confident the dogs will be able to perform well through all the types of smell tests they put them through.
Junqueira said, “We’ve seen these dogs detect pre-cancerous cells, meaning those at stage 0-1. Our 26 dogs include general cancer dogs and those trained in specific tumor types: currently breast and lung, and soon to be expanded to include prostate, colorectal and melanoma.”
Affordable and Friendly
Junqueira says their test could be considered a viable and affordable supplement to more traditional screening methods. The test costs just $50 on their website. Although, she does make it a point to mention, “It’s important to note that these screenings aren’t meant to replace a preventative visit to the doctor or diagnostic tests such as yearly MAMMOGRAMS. Although there is currently no cure for cancer, early detection offers the best hope of survival. A highly sensitive test for detecting cancer could potentially save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated.”
