Dogs can detect cancer in the blood with almost 97% accuracy

Dogs have odor receptors 10,000 times more accurate than humans, which makes them very sensitive to odors that we do not perceive. A new study has shown that dogs can use their highly developed sense of smell to take blood samples from people with cancer with almost 97% accuracy.

The results could lead to new, inexpensive and accurate approaches to cancer detection, without being invasive.

"Although there is currently no cure for cancer, early detection offers the best hope for survival," said study author Heather Junqueira, principal investigator. at BioScentDx. A very sensitive test to detect cancer could save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated. "

Junqueira presents this research at the annual meeting of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the 2019 Experimental Biology Meeting, which will be held until Tuesday in Orlando, Florida (USA).

For the new study, Junqueira and his colleagues used a form of training with an accountant to teach four Beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples of patients with malignant lung cancer.

Although a beagle, called Snuggles, was not motivated to act, the other three dogs correctly identified lung cancer samples in 96.7% of cases and normal samples in 97.5% of cases.

"This work is very exciting as it opens the door to future research in two ways, which could lead to new cancer screening tools," said Junqueira.

"One uses odor detection in dogs as a method of detecting cancer and the other involves determining the biological compounds that dogs detect and then designing cancer screening tests based on these compounds." ", he adds.

BioScentDx plans to use odor detection in dogs to develop a non-invasive way to detect cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

In a next step, the company launched a bad cancer study in November, in which participants donated their breath samples to dogs trained to detect cancer. Scientists also plan to separate the samples from their chemical components and present them to the dogs to isolate the substances responsible for the smell detected by the dogs.