Israeli Startup Trains Dogs to Sniff Out Cancer
Man’s best friend is medicine’s newest ally.
The moniker, “man’s best friend,” is well deserved. Dogs have been loyal and supportive companions to humankind for thousands of years. Man’s furriest friends are not only pets, but also they guide, protect, guard, and heal.
Now, pups may be about to add another role to their already impressive resumes – cancer detection. SpotitEarly, an Israeli-based start-up is combining dogs’ impressive sense of smell with artificial intelligence to create a cancer-screening breath test. This test, according to a study published in Nature, is 94 percent accurate at detecting malignancies. These include lung, breast, prostate, and colon cancer, which are the most common cancers.
An Impressive Sense of Smell
Dogs, The Jerusalem Post reported, are known for their impressive noses, and have already been recruited by humans to smell out explosives, drugs, and some diseases. The part of the canine brain that deals with smell is approximately 40 times larger than its human-brain counterpart. Additionally, dogs have 300 million smell receptors, which is 60 times the five million receptors that people have. These qualities give them a sense of smell that is tens of thousands of times stronger than people.
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Shlomi Madar, the CEO of SpotitEarly, told the New York Post that, “Our dogs are natural workers and love being mentally stimulated by their sense of smell. Training them to detect odors wasn’t a challenge; it is in their nature… That is what makes them highly effective for scent-based tasks, such as those in police forces or for detecting diseases in humans.”
An Affordable At-Home Screener
Dogs’ ability to sniff out cancer has been known and studied for decades, mobihealthnews explained. Dogs are able to accomplish this feat due to the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These are compounds released when exhaling and that contain information about how the body is functioning.
However, SpotitEarly may become the first to leverage pups’ known talent to create an affordable, reliable, at-home screener. According to The New York, the test kits are expected to cost only $25 and consist of an N95-like mask, which can be shipped directly to people’s homes. Users breathe into the mask for three minutes, mail the mask to SpotitEarly’s lab, and wait for results
A Partnership Between AI and Dogs
At the lab,The Jerusalem Post reported, a team of highly trained beagles gets to work smelling the samples in a sterile environment. These pups were trained on a number of positive and negative samples before being put to work.
Dogs smell each mask. If they detect cancer on a sample, they sit or lie down. And, this is where artificial intelligence comes into play. The AI’s job is to track the dogs’ behaviors and responses, which reduces human error related to misreading the dogs’ signals.
The dog-AI partnership has already proven its efficacy. In the Nature study, researchers enrolled 1,400 participants, 261 of whom were later found to have cancer. Dogs identified 245 of the 261 cancers, an accuracy rate of 94 percent. Even more impressive was the low rate of false negatives (healthy samples mistakenly detected as cancer-containing). Only 60 of the 1,048 non-cancer-containing masks were flagged as malignant.
Early Detection Saves Lives
It’s well known that early detection of cancers saves lives. However, many traditional screening methods are invasive or expensive, which can preclude early diagnosis.
“Only 14 percent of the U.S. population is diagnosed with cancer through a preventative screening method,” Madar told mobihealthnews. “Patients have a better chance of being diagnosed with cancer in the emergency room – a clear indication of systematic issues within our healthcare system, which has more often than not prioritized treatment over prevention.”
“By making early cancer detection and diagnosis more accessible, more affordable and less invasive,” he continued, “We are positioned to improve survival rates for millions of Americans, and more broadly, help shift the US healthcare system from a reactive model to a proactive one.”
Madar told the New York Post that, as the company name implies, their mission is to spot cancer early before it has a chance to grow, spread, and metastasize.
“Too often, cancer diagnoses come too late,” Madar told the New York Post. “Our goal is to reduce late-stage and potentially fatal cancer diagnoses. The data is clear: when we detect cancer earlier, we significantly improve survival rates and outcomes.”
“We aim to make early diagnosis the norm,” he added. “Consequently increasing the chances of survival at scale.”
Dogs are impressive animals known for loyalty, intelligence, and a super-human sense of smell. These qualities may prove essential and lifesaving in the battle against cancer. The future of early detection may just rest on a powerful partnership between man, machine, and man’s best friend.
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