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Sniffing Out Cancer

Over the years, our faithful canine companions have been trained to sniff out everything from bad guys to drugs and deadly explosives. But now, researchers are finding dogs also have a knack for sniffing out something that could potentially save thousands of lives — ovarian cancer.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center are training three dogs — McBaine, a Springer Spaniel; Ohlin, a Labrador Retriever; and Tsunami, a German Shepherd — on how to sniff out samples that contain ovarian cancer markers.

While using dogs to detect cancer is not new, this is the first time such research may be used to develop reliable methods of cancer detection and diagnosis in the near future. The reason dogs are so good at detecting cancer is they have a higher density of smell sensors and more olfactory genes than humans. They also have larger olfactory bulbs — the part of the forebrain that processes information gleaned from smells — than humans. The hope is these dogs will eventually be able to detect ovarian cancer in blood and even saliva or urine samples. In turn, this discovery may be able to help improve the survival rate for this disease, which claims more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system but only accounts for 3 percent of all women-related cancers.