Dogs Sniff Out Clues in the Fight Against Cancer

They’ve got funny names for cancer researchers, like Captain Jennings and Tibbs. They’re also a little furry and have a tendency to lick their white-coated colleagues. But these canine lab assistants may one day make it possible to detect cancers early enough to keep them from becoming fatal.

The Pine Street Foundation, a cancer education and research center in San Anselmo, Calif., is hoping one day to train these dogs to sniff out, literally, early-stage ovarian cancer—a disease that kills two-thirds of the 22,000 women diagnosed with it each year, according to the American Cancer Society, because it is often caught only after it has spread beyond the ovaries.

In 2006 the foundation published a study showing it was possible to train dogs to identify, based on breath samples, which patients had lung and breast cancer. Now the organization is recruiting ovarian cancer patients and dogs for a new study.

Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the foundation, says the dogs are helping to answer an important question that may one day lead to earlier detection of diseases like ovarian and pancreatic cancers, which are often caught only in very late stages: Does cancer have a smell?