A Bengaluru startup might be venturing into this as a business idea, where it plans to train dogs using artificial intelligence to potentially sniff out cancer.
Who here hasn’t read a hero story about a dog, cat or some other animal sniffing out a medical problem in a person? Many pet owners over the years have documented and marvelled at how their pets would know about their pregnancy long before even they knew about it.
Dogs are also used as medical support animals for those suffering from a disability of some kind.
It is not for nothing that dogs, especially, are called a person’s best friend.
What Is This Startup Doing?
The Bengaluru-based company is called Dognosis, a deeptech and healthtech startup founded in 2024 by Akash Kulgod. Kulgod is a cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley who spent time studying disease-detecting animals in research labs across Israel, Hungary and the United Kingdom.
He then brought home a former military dog handler he met during that research stint in Israel, along with the idea of starting such a company.
The startup’s screening platform is called BreathEasy and is meant to be a non-invasive test to detect cancer risk in a person. Currently, blood tests or imaging scans are used to detect cancer, but this platform would have a person breathe into a mask for 10 minutes, and this breath sample would then be processed through SniffSpace, the company’s automated detection platform.
Trained dogs then sniff the breath samples collected on these masks. The reason dogs are being used is their heightened sense of smell, which can pick up volatile organic compounds (VOCs), unique patterns created by cancer cells that are then released through one’s breath.
Kulgod stated, “That mask contains volatile organic compounds or VOCs, which essentially carry signals indicating whether a person has a disease or not. The masks are brought to our lab, where a team of trained dogs evaluates them and identifies these compounds with high accuracy.”
The dogs also wear a brain-computer interface that records each dog’s neural and behavioural response to a sample in order to provide a more accurate result.
Machine-learning software then converts that response into a standardised, measurable reading.
It is important to note, though, that this is not meant to diagnose cancer in any individual. This test would merely act as a first screening tool that could alert individuals to whether they need further investigation into their health, such as blood-based diagnostics, imaging or biopsies. This platform is essentially being made to limit invasive tests that are also expensive for the common person.
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Dognosis representative Manal Shakeel told WION, “We want to operate as a risk stratification tool. Our end goal is not to replace traditional screening methods. We want to identify people who may be at high risk so they can undergo follow-up testing.”
The company is also carrying out clinical studies of the platform to understand BreathEasy’s ability to give correct predictions, how specific it can get and its sensitivity.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) found that around 9% of the individuals who took this test were flagged positive for cancer even though they were not, and 9% of cancer cases were missed.
Medical experts, though, have also raised caution about this test, claiming that more studies need to be conducted to observe its real-world application, cost-effectiveness and actual benefit to people before it can be released for public use.
As per an India Today report, while Dr Ravi Mehrotra, cancer researcher and former Director of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research (ICMR-NICPR), believes that this test is promising, he added that “it is too early to draw conclusions until large-scale field trials, especially in remote settings, are completed.”
He also pointed to practical challenges such as transporting breath samples at low temperatures and developing logistics that make mass screening feasible.
The thing is, this is not the first time that experts and researchers have found animals, particularly dogs, extremely helpful in their field.
Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian who directs the Penn Vet Working Dog Center and has spent years training dogs to detect diseases including COVID-19, explained to Nature that this line of research actually goes back decades, noting that “the first evidence for their ability to smell disease, published in The Lancet in 1989, was of a dog sniffing and biting a woman’s mole, which turned out to be a melanoma.”
A dog’s nose carries hundreds of millions of scent receptors compared with a human’s roughly six million, and multiple veterinary sources put their olfactory sensitivity at somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times sharper than ours, capable of detecting certain compounds at concentrations as faint as one part per trillion.
That sensitivity is also why anecdotes about dogs and pregnancy are so common, even though the science there is thinner than for cancer detection.
Dr Rachel Barrack, a veterinarian at Animal Acupuncture in New York, explained the likely mechanism to Mother & Baby, saying, “Your dog is smart enough to pick up on these changes during pregnancy, both in a physical way, which is how your body will be changing, your stomach, your smell, and in an emotional way, such as your feelings and your mood.”
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: India Today, The Economic Times, Business Standard
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Cancer, Cancer detection, Cancer india, Cancer research, Cancer innovation, bengaluru, bengaluru startup, dogs, dogs cancer, dogs cancer detection
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