LEARNING FROM DOGS WHO SNIFF CANCERS AND A CALL FOR NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT DISEASE THERAPIES

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Jeffrey Newman

A number of scientific studies have established now that dogs can not only detect various cancers in their earliest stages–long before our tests can, but they can also accurately differentiate between breath and urine samples of patients with different types of cancer. A study published in January in the Journal of the Gut found that a specially trained Labrador retriever was able to identify the presence of cancer in breath and stool samples 95-98% of the time. The highest detection rates were with samples taken from individuals with early stages of the disease. Now Professor Hossam Haick of the Israel Institute of Technology is developing an artificial nose using advanced sensors modeled after the dog nose, which can detect chemical compounds that appear in the breeath of people with head neck and lung cancer. It works by smelling microscopic particles produced by tumorous cells and detecting changes in blood chemistry and metabolic activity.
These stories and others, particularly about animals that can sense diseases in their earliest phases and others who can sense the impending death have caused me to think. There is a cat in Rhode Island living in a nursing home, which jumps up on the bed of individuals who are close to death and cuddles against them until their lives have ended. It is not just the anthropomorphic mystery surrounding these established phenomina which interest me, it is the biologic process going on which allows them to sense illness and impending death. In other words the nose senses something different, something “bad” in animal thinking and then engages their responsive behavior to warn or comfort. This, it seems to me, is worthy more extensive study because it drives from millions of years of biological evolution.  I digress. Last year, neurologists at MGH dusted off the findings and tissues from an older clinical study that had been done on early Parkinson’s patients. They cleaned up the data and evaluated the bloods of 1500 individuals with early Parkinson’s which had been taken and stored in a refrigeration. The goal was to examine  and patterns as to how the body responded to the development of this enigmatic and poorly understood degenerative neurological disease. What the data revealed was that in individuals with early phase Parkinson’s disease, a significant numberwere producing an increased level of urate in their system both in their blood and in their urine. This is extra uric acid in the blood and urine might be the body’s response is needed to stop or slow this disease and what is causing it (presently unknown). Based on this thinking, scientists have now ramped up clinical studies by bumping the uric acid in Parkinson’s patients and early findings are promising. See: Michael J. Fox Foundation web site.  This unique melding of data mining and close examination of the human machine’s own processes, which are far more intricate than we can create, is a different way of finding promising leads to therapeutics and drugs.  It probably does not fit into the present scientific model, however which is more bound by traditional methods of trial and error and drug repositioning, However, it presently takes an average of 15-20 years to get a drug to market once it enters the development process. Lateral thinking,  more collaboration and more creative examination of existing biological systems,  must be the goal of our National Institutes of Health, the only existing authority for scientific funding in our country. With the evolving speed of computers and enhancements in data mining and predictive modeling a refined and effective study of the body’s own disease fighting processes is now possible on a cellular level. I am hoping that this becomes a distinctly new dscipline in medicine, something like “bioevolutionology” wih its own methodologies and standards and journals including the JOURNAL OF CLINICAL BIOEVOLUTION, as the emphasis must remain on clinical treatment, not on the advancement of knowledge for itself alone. The baseline concept is the study of the human body’s responses to chronic disease towards the development of clinical therapeutics including drugs. This does not address the question of how dogs can detect the smells of cancer and how they know it is damaging and whether part of their motivation is their love for and wish to please their owners. Stay tuned.