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A new study has shown that dogs can use their highly evolved sense of smell to take blood samples from people with cancer with an accuracy of almost 97%. Credit: BioScentDx
Dogs have olfactory receptors 10,000 times more accurate than humans, which makes them very sensitive to odors that we can not perceive. A new study has shown that dogs can use their highly evolved sense of smell to take blood samples from people with cancer with an accuracy of almost 97%. The results could lead to new inexpensive and accurate cancer screening approaches without being invasive.
"Although there is currently no cure for cancer, early detection offers the best hope for survival," said Heather Junqueira, Senior Researcher at BioScentDx and study lead. "A very sensitive test to detect cancer could potentially save thousands of lives and change the way the disease is treated."
Junqueira will present this research at the annual meeting of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the 2019 Experimental Biology Meeting to be held April 6-9 in Orlando, Florida.
For the new study, Junqueira and his colleagues used a form of click training to teach four Beagles to distinguish between normal blood serum and samples of patients with malignant lung cancer. Although one beagle – named Snuggles – was not motivated, 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 paves the way for new research in two ways, both of which could lead to new tools for detecting cancer," said Junqueira. "One uses canine fragrance detection as a method of cancer screening and the other is to identify the biological compounds that dogs detect and then develop cancer screening tests based on these compounds."
BioScentDx plans to use canine fragrance detection to develop a non-invasive method of screening for cancer and other life-threatening diseases. In a next step, the company launched a bad cancer study in November, in which participants donated breath samples to tests conducted by trained dogs to detect cancer. The researchers also plan to separate the samples into their chemical components and present them to the dogs in order to isolate the substances responsible for the odor detected by the dogs.
This article has been republished from materials provided by Experimental Biology. Note: Content may have changed for length and content. For more information, please contact the cited source.
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