Miracles with paws

Did you know that at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, a female Labrador retriever has been specially trained to sniff out bowel cancer?  Her name is Marine, and she has been sniffing samples of bowel cancer at the St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Center in Minamiboso.

She can identify  cancerous from non cancerous samples present in either breath or stool samples! She was made to  carry out 74 "sniff tests" over several months by  lead researcher Hideto Sonoda and his team. The breath and stool samples would vary, so as to complicate things and  create a more real-life  situation. Hence,  some samples would contain confirmed cases of bowel cancer, while others were non-cancerous, contained bowel polyps, gut problems such as inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers, diverticulitis, or appendicitis. Results are amazingly promising, as her accuracy is high and on par with colonoscopy tests ( a technique used to examine the internal environment of the colon).


As training dogs and using them as a screening tool for this purpose is said to be expensive, scientists and researchers are aiming to learn how the dog can differentiate samples. This is to  one day create a sensor which can specifically detect cancer compounds present  in faecal material , breathe or the air, as cancer is believed to smell differently from other cells in the body.

A picture of Marine sniffing out samples

Here is to hope, that one day, these little miracles with paws will bring us another step closer to helping us better understand this dreaded disease. Not just for those who have bowel cancer, but for all those who are suffering different types of cancers. Here is to hope that as each day passes, this dream will manifest into reality, and that we will grow towards saving millions and millions of lives.