As if we needed another reason to call dogs “man’s best friend.”
A new study presented this week at the 2019 Experimental Biology conference in Orlando, Fla., reveals that blood-sniffing dogs may become the latest frontier in cancer detection. Thanks to their unfathomably keen sense of smell — which is 10,000 times more accurate than a human’s — dogs in the lab were able to pick-out blood samples from cancer patients with 97 percent accuracy.
The results could lead to canine detection as a low-cost, non-invasive approach to cancer screening and perhaps other diseases, says Heather Junqueira, lead researcher on the study.
“Previous studies leveraging canines in the cancer detection space have yielded accuracy rates of up to 99 percent,” Junqueira tells The Post, who says dogs may also be able to detect cancer earlier than other traditional exams.
“We’ve seen these dogs detect pre-cancerous cells, meaning those at stage 0-1.”
Janqueira and her team taught four beagles to distinguish between healthy blood samples and those from patients with malignant lung cancer. While one beagle named Snuggles was not interested in playing doctor, the other three dogs were able to identify cancerous samples 96.7 percent of the time.
BioScentDx, the lab where the study was performed, is also testing whether dogs can smell cancer in the breath condensate of breast cancer patients — with very promising early results according to Junqueira. They also plan to isolate the chemical compounds in samples and find out exactly where the odor originates.
She adds, “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.”
Junqueira says their test could be considered a viable and affordable — the test costs just $50 on their website — supplement to more traditional screening methods: “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.”
BioScentDx isn’t the only lab that offers scent-based cancer detection, but Junqueira warns consumers to “do their research” before making the choice, saying other companies may “lack the science and data” to support their claims.