Since 2004, the British charity Medical Detection Dogs has been training gun dogs to detect cancer. Recent results show that Daisy, the most veteran dog in the centre, has a 95 per cent of accuracy and a 93 per cent of specificity in detecting bladder cancer, after having screened over 6,000 samples.

It has been proven that dogs’ sense of smell is between 100,000 and a million times better than humans and that while we have 5 million sensible receptors they have up to 200 million.

Rob Harris, Bio detection manager for Medical Detection Dogs, claims that “trained dogs are able to ignore healthy and diseased urine samples and find the ones that have cancer molecules in them”.

Extending the cancer detection

Medical Detection Dogs has been working on the detection of kidney and prostate cancer as well and dogs seem to respond to the cancer molecules on the urine samples, according to their most recent results.

Claire Guest, CEO and director of operations of Medical Detection Dogs argues that

“The current PSA –blood test to detect prostate cancer– has a 75 per cent false positive rate giving very unreliable results, which makes it very difficult for medics to decide who should be sent for a screening.

“However, if they had a urine test to overlay with the blood test and the result was positive in both cases a biopsy would be the next step”.

Medical Detection Dogs is a charity that works in partnership with researchers, NHS Trusts and Universities.

Mercedes Amézola