Alfie and Charlie, two four-month-old puppies, are just like any other dogs. But they’re being raised just a little bit differently.
Specifically, they’re being raised to sniff out cancer.
There’s been research that’s said that dogs can sniff out cancer for a while now. They can smell cancer in urine, saliva, and even in breath.
Dogs have a highly sensitive sense of smell, which makes them perfect for this kind of job. They have 220 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to 5 million receptors in a human’s nose.
So these two, Alfie and Charlie, will be part of a clinical trial at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA. They’re being trained for the next year to socialize with humans and sniff out head, neck, and lung cancers.
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The training requires them to not only sniff out cancer, but also to ignore all other smells and distractions.
They’re very important to research, since while researchers know that dogs can sniff out cancer, they don’t really know what it is they’re sniffing. By studying cancer sniffers like Charlie and Alfie, they may be able to pinpoint the compound they’re smelling and reverse engineer a test that can make early detection more possible.
To learn more about these cancer-sniffing dogs, watch this video about their journey.
What do you think of these groundbreaking pups?
Photo Copyright © 2015 UC Regents/KCRA 3
