Dog smells out cancer in urine

Researchers from Tenon Hospital in Paris have shown that a dog can discriminate between urine from confirmed prostate-cancer patients and urine from healthy men.
For a year, Jean-Nicolas Cornu, M.D., and Pierre Bigot, MD, trained a Belgian Malinois to identify urine from; men with prostate cancer. They then presented the dog with six urine samples, one of which came from a man with prostate cancer.
The dog was trained to sit in front of the urine he considered cancerous.
Out of 66 tests, the dog chose the correct sample 63 times and chose a false positive (a healthy sample) three times.
"The dog is certainly recognising the odour of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells," Cornu says. "The problem is that we don't know what this molecule is, and the dog cannot tell us."
The next step, he says, is to determine precisely what the dogs are sniffing and to develop an "electronic nose" to detect it.
The study, titled "The Use of Canines for Prostate Cancer Detection: Towards a Non-Invasive Alternative Screening Tool" was first published in The Journal of Urology, April 2010, Vol. 183, Issue 4, Supplement.