The dog’s nose knows

Modern medicine has come so far that researchers are working on nano-sized machines to seek out cancerous cells, and even cancer sniffing dogs. German researchers have reportedly trained canines to, with some accuracy, distinguish between the breath of a human with lung cancer, and one without.

Lung cancer is unfortunately one of the harder diseases to diagnose as there are not many easily distinguishable symptoms of a human with lung cancer versus that of a regular smoker. However, dogs with a far more sensitive sense of smell than our noses, may be able to pick up on faint markers otherwise undetectable in breath.

No wonder dogs are called human's best friend, for thousands of years they have been instrumental in the human species' dominance over their world. In this particular study, published by German researchers in the European Respiratory Journal, the dog's detection rate for lung cancer was reportedly at 71 per cent. The dogs were also able to correctly identify which samples did not have cancer at an accuracy of 93 per cent.

Although very likeable, a dog's ability to accurately screen for lung cancer shouldn't be given too much credibility, said Martin Tammemagi, Professor in the Community Health Sciences faculty at Brock University. He is a co-investigator on the US National Cancer Institute sponsored National Lung Cancer Screening Trial.

"The sniff test will have too many false positives that will lead to an excess number of needless diagnostic work-ups, risk to individuals (sometimes death) and psychological distress for the individual, family and friends," said Tammemagi.

Tammemagi's research resulted in the creation of an accurate predictor of who is at risk of lung cancer according to their smoking history.

Nano-sized technology "would take years to get into clinical or public health practice," said Tammemagi.

They do, however, show promise in that they can be made smaller than a human cell, and as such are able to interact with cells on an individual basis. Nano-technologies will first need to be developed to both locate and then treat the disease.

From finding the cells to then fixing them, one team of researchers at Harvard University is looking at a community based method of finding ways to combat particularly difficult to find and treat diseases.

By utilizing information gathered from unhealthy cells found in an affected patient, they were then able to create a molecule which would rewrite the hard wired objective of a cancerous cell to replicate itself in a detrimental fashion.

They called their new molecule JQ1, after the chemist that made it, Jun Qi. Trials on mice showed promise in removing cancerous cells in the animal.

The difference in their research, to that of pharmaceutical companies, is that once they sequenced the genetic information, they published their findings, encouraged other researchers to use their discovery and to build upon it. It is referred to as crowd-sourcing or open-source research, and so far that shared information was used in other labs to combat diseases in mice, such as Leukaemia.

In an industry where intellectual property of new drugs can make a company millions, these researchers instead chose to distribute their knowledge. One of the researchers, Dr. Jay Bradner, explained their aim as being to take the collective will and knowledge of researchers across Europe and the US.

For the TED talk video on the Harvard researchers' progress go to goo.gl/hnvBq.