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Health December 2013

Aid for Age

Women’s Best Friend; Cancer’s Best Finder

By Tait Trussell

Penn Vet founder and executive director Cynthia M. Otto hopes the dogs can detect the specific odor so well that scientists can design a less invasive test to catch ovarian cancer while it is still treatable.

Man’s best friend may also be a woman’s best friend.

A chocolate lab, in a research project at the University of Pennsylvania has been trained to sniff out ovarian cancer, which kills 14,000 women a year. Some 22,000 new cases will be diagnosed in 2013.

All women are at risk for ovarian cancer. But older women are more likely to get the disease than younger women. The greatest number of cases occurs in women age 60 and older. When ovarian cancer is found at the earliest stages, treatment is most effective.

The chocolate lab and his partner, a springer spaniel, are part of an interdisciplinary effort between the Penn Vet Working Dog Center and three sections of the university — the physics department, the division of gynecologic oncology, and the Monell Chemical Senses Center — to detect early cancers.

Dogs, with their incredible sense of smell, have been used for search and rescue missions because of their keen olfactory receptors.

In previous research, dogs have been used to detect cancer of the breast as well.

After eight weeks of obedience training, the dogs had been introduced to the cancer tissue smell. Penn Vet founder and executive director Cynthia M. Otto hopes the dogs can detect the specific odor so well that scientists can design a less invasive test to catch ovarian cancer while it is still treatable.

“We had a party and played with the dogs with toys. They quickly figured out what they had to do to get the toys,” she said.

Engineering students at Penn designed a large wheel with paint cans at the end of each spoke. Only one of the cans held cancer tissue. The dogs had been taught to sit at the can that held the cancer.

Otto is a veterinarian and researcher. She founded the Penn Vet Working Dog Center after spending time caring for the search and rescue dogs deployed in the burning rubble of the World Trade Center.

When it comes to the sense of smell, dogs far surpass human beings’ capacity; humans use about 350 different olfactory receptors. Dogs use more than 1,000 to inhale the world of smells.

The intent of the study is that, “by combining information from dog studies, analytical chemistry, and nano [very small] sensor studies, we can make more rapid progress toward the goal of diagnosing ovarian and other cancers from their volatile signature,” said A. T. Charlie Johnson, a physics professor at Penn.

He hopes to develop a nanotube device to detect and identify odorants and other chemical compounds using single strands of DNA.

When a strand of DNA is attached to the carbon nanotube, it takes on a complex and specific shape, forming small, pocket-like structures that interact with molecules in the air.

“When we change the base sequence of the DNA, we get a device that responds differently to odors in the air,” Johnson says. “In effect, we’re mimicking how the nose works.”

For this study, the Working Dog Center, Johnson’s group and a chemist at Monell Chemical Center will analyze tissue and blood samples from ovarian cancer patients.

Currently doctors use expensive diagnostic tools to detect ovarian cancer, instruments that still fail to find the cancer until it has reached an advanced stage.

Thanks to the sniffing dogs for leading the way toward early cure.

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

Meet Tait