Who let the dogs out (to detect cancer)?

If someone in your life is obsessed with "PAW Patrol," you've likely learned that for heroic canines, no job is too big, no pup is too small.

That certainly holds for a group of dogs in India who have been tasked with sniffing out early signs of cancer in human breath.

The excellently named startup Dognosis trains a team of Labradors, beagles, and other breeds, and uses sensors to interpret signals from the pups for a low-cost cancer screening, per Bloomberg.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Dogs have been known to detect drugs, explosives, and whatever your neighbor's dog left behind. Now their impressive olfactory sense is being used to sniff out medical conditions, including seizures, low blood sugar in diabetic patients, covid, and cancer.

Early detection — before blood tests, scans, or biopsies — is critically important:

• Seventy percent of cancers are diagnosed after symptoms appear.
• The average cancer screening rate among US adults is below 60%.

India's need is especially acute:

• One in 10 Indians risk developing cancer before 75.
• It has the third-highest prevalence of new cases worldwide, yet screenings are rare.
• It saw ~1.5m new cancer cases and over 900k related deaths in 2024.

How Dognosis works

• Patients breathe into a mask; samples are sent to the lab.
• Dogs sniff the samples.
• Sensors and AI analyze the dogs' movement, brain activity, respiration, and body language to determine if the sample has signs of cancer.

Don't worry, it's no dog-eat-dog workplace. The pups only spend 30-60 minutes a day detecting and are rewarded with treats, walks, and playtime on a farm.

Nonetheless, they've shown promising results:

• A ~90% sensitivity for over 20 types of early-stage cancers.
• It's identified cancer types they hadn’t previously encountered.
• Dognosis plans to process 1m tests/year, double its canine team to 30, and halve turnaround times to a week.
• The US facility could open by late 2027 or early 2028.

Next year, Dognosis aims to release an inexpensive at-home, multi-cancer prescreening test in India.

Who else?

Startup SpotitEarly landed $20m in funding for a platform that also uses dogs for early cancer detection.

And while a dog's nose is considered 100k times more sensitive than a human's, one woman detected Parkinson's disease with her sense of smell.

Seems like the "PAW Patrol" pack is getting bigger.