Can Dogs Really Sniff Out Cancer?

By Christopher Cheney

Hackensack Meridian Health has entered a partnership with SpotitEarly to study the early detection of breast cancer with cancer sniffing dogs combined with artificial intelligence technology.

Early detection of cancer is critical for achieving positive clinical outcomes. With early detection, cancer can not only be treated effectively but also be cured in many cases, according to Elias Obeid, MD, MPH, medical director of the Hackensack Meridian Health Hennessy Institute for Cancer Prevention and Applied Molecular Medicine. In addition, when cancer is detected at an early stage, less aggressive therapy is effective, Obeid says.

SpotitEarly uses beagles that are trained to detect cancer in combination with artificial intelligence technology.

“Training dogs to detect cancer is similar to training them to detect any other scent,” says Shlomi Madar, PhD, CEO of SpotitEarly. “There are many smell applications for dogs, including police, military, and airport applications. They detect drugs and explosives. Dogs can sniff a piece of cloth, then detect a missing person from miles away.”

SpotitEarly’s model for cancer detection with dogs features patients breathing into a mask, where volatile organic compounds secreted by tumors are collected.

SpotitEarly then uses artificial intelligence technology to monitor the dogs’ response to sniffing the gas such as movements and heart rate.

“The information collected from the dogs is fed into a machine learning algorithm,” Madar says. “The machine learning looks for any deviation from baseline—it knows the typical behavior of the dog and looks for deviations, which call tell you with a level of confidence about detecting cancer from a particular sniff.”

Dogs are a promising method for early detection of cancer, according to Obeid.

“We all know that dogs have an incredible and extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell,” Obeid says. “Dogs can smell and detect volatile organic compounds that are associated with cancer. Early stages of cancer tumors secrete volatile organic compounds that can be detected in human breath. Dogs can sniff these compounds.”

Research published last year by the journal Nature found that dogs trained to sniff cancer combined with artificial intelligence technology can be effective in the early detection of cancer.

Why the new partnership is targeting breast cancer

There are several reasons why Hackensack Meridian and SpotitEarly are starting their cancer-sniffing dogs research with breast cancer.

“We want to start with a cancer that has multiple positive samples, so we can test the platform with the dogs and the technology,” Madar says. “We want to make sure our platform is working before we can branch out to other cancers that are harder to screen and therefore have fewer positive samples.”

Breast cancer also has a particularly high survival rate when it is detected early, Madar says.

“If you detect breast cancer at Stage 1, there is a 99% chance of survival for the patient,” Madar says. “So, by being able to detect breast cancer at Stage 1, we hope to reduce the mortality rate and improve quality of life for patients.”

Starting cancer sniffing dog research with breast cancer should be a springboard for more research on using the method for other cancers, according to Obeid.

“Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide and in the United States,” Obeid says. “If we can demonstrate a technology that can be helpful in addressing this most common cancer in women, then it can be tested for other cancers.”

Christopher Cheney is the CMO editor at HealthLeaders.