AI’s new cancer-screening partner has four legs and a very good nose
Indian startup Dognosis combines trained detection dogs with sensors and AI to flag cancer-associated signals from breath, with a 10,000-person Phase 3 trial underway.
An Indian startup based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, is harnessing the olfactory abilities of dogs to assist in cancer detection. Patients breathe into a mask for approximately 10 minutes, and the sealed samples are shipped to a lab. The dogs, trained to recognize changes in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) linked to cancer, work alongside sensors that monitor additional data.
These sensors track movement, respiration, brain activity, and body language, which are converted into standardized data by the startup's AI. In a Phase 2 study involving 1,502 participants, including 283 with biopsy-confirmed cancer, four trained dogs achieved over 90% accuracy in identifying both cancerous and non-cancerous samples across seven types of cancer, including breast, lung, cervical, and oral cancers.
A Phase 3 trial initiated in April aims to enroll around 10,000 individuals and ultimately involve 30 dogs to conduct approximately one million tests annually. However, Dognosis' system is not intended as a definitive diagnostic tool but rather a prescreening method. A positive result would guide patients toward further medical testing.
The startup envisions an at-home prescreening launch in India by 2027, with the current trials still needing to demonstrate effectiveness in broader clinical use.
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