By Jonathan Frazier

Cancer has plagued everyone from avid chain smokers to health conscious athletes for ages with very little warning before it’s too late, but could an effective detection system have been right under our noses for just as long?

A new study being conducted in part by BioScentDX is using beagles to detect cancer in humans based on a specific odor.

With 10 testing donors and four dough-eyed beagles, BioScentDX was ready to begin testing. Soon enough, however, trouble arose when the fourth beagle remained unmotivated. According to The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association:

One dog, Canine No. 4, was eliminated from the study because she was poorly motivated by food and did not respond well to any training method used.

The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association

The other three dogs’ tests went on to achieve extremely high accuracy in sniffing out the serums that were positive for lung cancer.

However, before you go adopt 50 beagles and buy 1,000 training biscuits with the hope of making millions, know that this beagle-breakthrough works in a very controlled experiment.

This is a pilot study with a relatively low sample size; after 1 dog was eliminated for poor response to training, there were only 30 positive and 120 negative samples used. Although the P value of the data was significant, additional studies are needed to verify the efficacy of the data… Future studies are needed to determine whether dogs can detect cancer at an earlier stage than the current methods of chest x-ray and CT imaging.

The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association

Breeding lines for dogs with a high sensitivity to smelling cancerous blood has already begun, and many of the pups are already being trained, like their parents, to sniff out this hidden enemy. We are at the start of what could be the next big step in defeating cancer, and who better to be at the helm than our floppy-eared, four-legged friends!