Marine is an 8-year-old female black lab. She is substantially more cuddly than a colonoscopy. But she's just about as good at detecting colon cancer.
The dog's Japanese owner and trainer, Yugi Satoh, has been teaching her to sniff out cancer cells since 2005. Marine is trained to sniff at bags containing breath samples from humans, then sit down in front of the sample that smells like cancer. No one knows exactly what chemical signature the dog is smelling, but Satoh says Marine has detected diseases as diverse as lung, breast, prostate, pancreatic and ovarian cancer.
In a new study, Marine sniffed human stool samples in addition to breath samples. She was first given samples from patients with colon cancer and told to find a match. Sniffing breath samples from 306 people, 48 of whom had colon cancer (as diagnosed by a colonoscopy), the dog correctly identified 91% of the ...
