Dogs Being Trained to Detect Cancer

June 11 -- Dogs could soon become man's best friend when it comes to detecting prostate cancer if new research plans are successful.

Researchers at Cambridge University Veterinary School in England are awaiting funding to test the viability of what they call "dognoseis" — detecting the traces of prostate cancer by training dogs to smell signatures of the disease in urine samples.

The veterinary researchers hope that dogs might someday play a role in screening patients for early signs of prostate cancer, although some medical professionals remain skeptical.

"If the dogs can be trained to a high level of accuracy, which we think can be done, then many people can be screened a lot faster and a lot earlier," said Charlie Clarricoates, the lead dog trainer for the project.

Cancer-Sniffing Record

Past cases led the Cambridge researchers to think dogs would be up to the task. As detailed in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1989, a border collie-Doberman mix belonging to a British woman repeatedly sniffed a mole on its owner's thigh and once even tried to bite it off. The constant attention prompted the woman to have the lesion examined and she learned it was a malignant melanoma.

"The dog may have saved her life by forcing her to seek medical advice while the mole was still at a thin stage," wrote Hywell Williams and Andrew Pembroke, surgeons at the dermatology department at King's College Hospital in London, in a letter to The Lancet.

In another case, a pet Labrador named Parker repeatedly pushed his nose against his 66-year-old owner's leg, sniffing a lesion through the owner's pants. When the man had the lesion examined, he learned it was a basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer, and had it removed.

Neither dogs showed any interest in their owners' lesions after they were treated.

After seeing the Lancet report, Armand Cognetta, a dermatologist at a clinic in Tallahassee, Fla., began collaborating with a police dog handler to train dogs to locate and retrieve tissue samples of melanoma that had been removed and stored in bottles. When the dog, George, proved 100 percent successful in detecting melanoma samples in tests, Cognetta had it smell suspect areas on his patients' skin. He reported the dog was nearly 100 percent successful in detecting cancerous skin lesions in patients.