Cancer detecting canines

Adelle Ellis
Times Reporter

 

Service dogs and bio-detection dogs are commonly used throughout Alberta and Canada, and around the world.
But there is one process that isn’t as commonly used with dogs, and Langdon resident Liz Dick hopes to change that.
“There are many bio-detection dogs that can detect epilepsy or diabetes, but I am looking specifically to train dogs to detect cancer,” said Dick, who throughout her life has trained her own, her family’s and her friend’s dogs.
Although controversial as to its effectiveness and validity, cancer detection done by man’s best friend has been around since the 1990s. Several research facilities and working centres exist across the world, one of them being the In Situ Foundation in California which has been operating as a canine cancer detection facility in partnership with surrounding universities, hospitals and cancer clinics.
The In Situ Foundation (dogsdetectcancer.org) has trained over 50 dogs in the past 12 years to detect cancer, and as of October 2016, is now offering classes to eight people a month who want to learn how to train dogs to detect cancer. One of these people is Dick, who will be taking the six-day course in February.
“There are a few clinics all over the world that train dogs to detect cancer, but this is the only one that teaches people how to train the dogs,” said Dick. “They only accept students who have dog training experience, or they will accept doctors, oncologists and nurses because they are in the profession. This will teach me everything I need to know to train a dog and get partnerships in place and a clinic set up. There are only a handful of people in the whole world who have this certification.”
Unsure how a dog can detect cancer? The answer is through scent detection. Canines can smell in parts-per-trillion, making a dog’s sense of smell approximately 100,000 times more accurate than a human’s. Using scent training has already proven effective through such practices as searching for narcotics or bombs, and alerting people when they are about to have a seizure or go into diabetic shock.
The In Situ Foundation found they could train the dogs to detect cancer using scent training on cancer samples, healthy control samples and disease control samples. A dog smells a breath sample, or a urine or saliva sample from humans, and is positively reinforced if it is correct when it alerts you that it’s found a cancer sample. Over time, the odour of “cancer” is generalized to the medical scent detection dog. They have been found to detect some types of cancers with an accuracy rate of 98 per cent.
It takes about 300 breath samples to train a medical scent detection dog, and so far, it has been found that dogs can detect the very early stages of prostate, breast, upper thoracic, melanoma, lung, ovarian and bladder cancers.
Once Dick returns from the course, she will begin working on setting up a viable foundation and business.
“I have a lot of questions that I still need answered. But this is what I want to do, I’m committed and I’m going to make this work,” said Dick. “At the age of 55 I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. Now I’m going to use the second half of my life, my next 55 years, to work on this.”
Dick has been researching this form of cancer detection for over a year, but it wasn’t until last August that Dick’s passion spurted, unfortunately due to the death of her mother.
“My mother died of cancer this past August. After that I knew I had to take my knowledge of canine scent detection to the next level and apply it to cancer detection,” said Dick.
“This will be a long process. I need to get partnerships put in place and get a facility where I can do this,” she added. “Then it will take six to 18 months to train each dog using breath samples. After that I will be able to start working with doctors and hospitals to give real results to real people.”
Dick plans on starting a GoFundMe page after she gets a plan in place in the hopes people will see the benefit of her research and would like to help donate so she can get a centre up and running.
“I want people to contact me and ask questions after I take the course in February so that I can tell them what I’m doing,” said Dick, who can be reached by e-mail at liz.dick212@gmail.com.
“If through all the months and months of training, and even all the expense this research will incur, if just one person’s life could be saved because I made the effort to train the dogs to specifically detect cancer cells, it will all be worth it,” she added.