A new program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of medicine (Penn Vet) is putting noses to the grindstone for disease detection. Researchers are working with dogs to ascertain if the canines’ superior sniffers can help with early detection of COVID-19 in humans.
Dogs that will pinpoint the scent of COVID-19 could identify infection in asymptomatic people and will play a valuable role in disease response as people return to figure and social-distancing restrictions are relaxed, Penn Vet representatives said during a statement.
Reports of dogs sniffing out cancer are documented since the 1980s, Live Science previously reported. Many cells produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that have distinctive odors and are present “in human blood, saliva, urine or breath,” Cynthia Otto, a doctor of medicine and a director of Penn Vet’s dog Center, said within the statement.
Studies have shown that the smell of VOCs released by cancerous cells is exclusive enough that dogs’ sensitive noses — which have up to 300 million scent detectors, compared with around 6 million in people — can spot the presence of cancer cells amid healthy ones; actually, most dogs are often trained in about six months to spot the smell of a selected cancer. that very same ability could enable dogs to spot disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
In the Penn Vet program, eight dogs will initially be trained during a laboratory setting. Over three weeks, they’re going to first learn to acknowledge the smell of COVID-19 in saliva and urine samples from infected patients, through a way referred to as odor imprinting, consistent with another Penn Vet statement. The dogs will then be tasked with differentiating between those samples and samples collected from people that don’t have the disease.
“The potential impact of those dogs and their capacity to detect COVID-19 might be substantial,” Otto said. “This study will harness the dog’s extraordinary ability to support the nation’s COVID-19 surveillance systems, to reduce community spread.”
But could exposure to COVID-19 pose a threat to the dogs? In March, a pet dog in Hong Kong tested positive for COVID-19, and experts suspected that it had caught the disease from its infected owner, Live Science reported. this is often thought to be the primary example of human-to-animal transmission of COVID-19.
However, some experts were doubtful about the dog’s diagnosis. Initially, the animal didn’t receive a biopsy that might have confirmed the presence of coronavirus antibodies created to repel the infection, and a biopsy that was performed later didn’t find any coronavirus antibodies, Live Science reported.
Then again, it’s possible that the dog experienced a light immune reaction to COVID-19 that didn’t require the assembly of specific antibodies. Another dog, a pug in North Carolina, also tested positive for COVID-19 after likely catching it from its owners, Time reported on April 28.
Trained dogs might be able to start sniffing out COVID-19 in humans by July, consistent with the Penn Vet
