Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hi and welcome to the Yes to Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host of the show and also founder of the UK charity Yes to Life, that helps those with cancer to find out about and access integrative medicine to support them through treatment and in regaling their health. My guest today is an expert in an area that is a bit different even for this show, medical detection dogs. If you’re wondering what on earth I’m on about, stay tuned to hear about this extraordinary field of research from Sophie Aziz. Thanks so much for joining me on the Yes to Life show.

Sophie Aziz
You’re very welcome, lovely to be here and thank you very much for having me.

Robin Daly
So, your job title is Head of Bioresearch at Medical Detection Dogs, and for the benefit of any listeners who may be wondering if we’ve lost the plot a bit and are talking about canine health, could you explain exactly what the topic is here and give a general idea of the scope of the medical detection that’s within the orbit of dogs so far?

Sophie Aziz
Absolutely. So, Medical Detection Dogs is a very unique charity based in New York. We use the amazing power of canine olfaction to find human disease. You know, the charity is set up to do this in two specific ways. We have our Medical Alert Assistance Dog side of the charity, which trains dogs, especially for individuals with highly complex medical needs, like POTS, which is postural for the static tachycardia syndrome, type 1 hypone wear diabetes, mass activation syndrome, and other complex conditions. But the area of research that I focus on is using our dogs in trials, so, akin to clinical trials, to find human diseases, including various cancers, malaria, pseudomonas, bacteria, and COVID-19.

Robin Daly
All right, I didn’t know they were being used for COVID-19 detection as well. Very interesting. Okay, so your charge has been around for some years. I was looking back and I see that I visited you in around 2009. So that’s about 15 years ago. I seem to recall your own old airfield in Bucky, I’m sure. Are you still there?

Sophie Aziz
Yes. So the old airfield hasn’t changed. We’re still an old airfield, but the building has definitely changed and we’ve definitely got quite a bit bigger. So we’re really lucky that in 2019 we had a specially bespoke building put in for us to give us more training, more facilities. So we have a much better facilities and services available for what we need to do, including a completely revamped biodetection building. So we’ve got more training rooms and more ability to handle samples on site.

Robin Daly
Fantastic to receive that kind of support. Very good, well deserved. So when did you actually start up, who started it and why?

Sophie Aziz
Yeah, absolutely. So the charity is actually in its 15th year. We’re about to celebrate its anniversary, but it was started by an incredible CEO, Dr. Claire Guest. And all of it really started with a little bit of an inclination that dogs may have this ability to find disease. It started off with an anecdote of a friend of hers who had a Dalmatian who was very persistently looking at a mole on her friend’s leg, who was really, really quite obsessed with it. Eventually Claire’s friend went and got it checked out and it turned out the mole was a malignant melanoma. And this really started to get the cogs turning.

Robin Daly
Yeah, a serious skin cancer, right?

Sophie Aziz
Yes, absolutely and later on So things things continue to go clear Dr Claire guess has got a significant experience of working with in the assistance dog world and has trained dogs for whole life and then it was in 2000 to 2003 Clem’s listening to the radio and heard Uh a man called dr. John church on on the radio Uh speaking about maggots in the nhs My doubts. Okay, right introducing the use of maggots in the nhs and At the end of the interview the question came out from from a listener saying Asking do you think there are any other animals who could be used within the healthcare? industry and Dr. Church said on the radio. Well, I think that dogs could be used to detect cancer if anyone knows Or has an interest i’d love for them to contact me. So claire did and later this afternoon. She was sat around her kitchen table with Her dad, uh and dr. John church both of which became co-founders of the charity Discussing as to how this could happen I made it They got samples. They started training and then in 2004 we published our first paper in the british medical journal um for the detection of bladder cancer And it’s all gone from there really uh And the charities progressively got some bigger and expanded and as they said now looks at also Meddle to sister strokes as well as continuing our research into cancer and disease detection

Robin Daly
amazing okay well a few weeks ago i had leeches on the show for the first time maggots this time so that’s good uh we’re really expanding here um um so here’s a chat probably the thing that brought me to see you then back in 2009 was actually news of the founding of the charity i’d forgotten that but you said it was set up in 2009 yeah

Sophie Aziz
i think it was four years as a charity in 2008

Robin Daly
All right, yeah, so it probably wasn’t news of it being set up, it alerted me and made me want to go and have a look. But prior to that, I hadn’t heard anything about dogs and cancer detection at all, and it really fascinated me. So anyway, once again, the media gave me the nudge to killing contacts and invite you to come on the show today as you’ve just had some recent well deserved media attention. Do you want to tell us about that?

Sophie Aziz
Yes, I mean, we’ve been incredibly lucky with our publicity, particularly over the past year, we’ve had some fantastic opportunities to talk about various aspects of our work. The most recent of which has been our dogs featuring in the Kennel Club charitable trust photo shoot. That’s when one of our most recent one of that was featuring one of our trainers Caitlin and one of our detection dogs Bobbin.

Robin Daly
You’re onto a bit of a winner in a way with dogs, which of course, you know, the Brits love dogs. I mean, if it was maggots you’re trying to sell to everybody, it probably wouldn’t be going so well. But it’s good, really good for Bud Listy, because the whole concept of dogs helping people is kind of inbuilt into our culture. So yeah, it’s something that grabs media attention quite easily in some ways.

Sophie Aziz
Yes, absolutely. We’re very lucky that dogs are a bit fluffier and a bit cuter than maggots, which makes it easier. It’s a bit more appealing to find volunteers to look after them, which does help a lot. But I think this is really the relationship with dogs is very much the core of what we do and the center of everything that we focus on. And we’re very much driven by the dogs working on positive reinforcement. They do the job because they want to do it. We make it a game for them. And unfortunately, they don’t know that they’re doing this incredible life saving work. They don’t know the impact that they’re having on medical research. They go into a training room and they do it all for a treat or a tennis ball at the end of the day. And they’re very happy to do so. So it’s lovely to see the relationship between the trainers and all the staff here on site. We have a no kettle policy to all of our dogs during the day, are in offices with us and get to have lots of playtime out in our paddocks. And then at night, they go home to our incredible team of volunteers who look after them all for us. So really, the dog is at the heart of everything that we do.

Robin Daly
Right. And there must be something at work which is beyond the treat or the tennis ball because of the fact of the story you told us in actual fact a dog naturally is looking after its owner and concerned to find a cancer and somehow knows there’s a danger to its owner. And that’s an incredible thing. Does anybody understand that in any way?

Sophie Aziz
There’s certainly more research looking into the understanding of it. And we know dogs are incredibly intuitive to people. And with this becoming, there’s more evidence now building of how oxytocin plays into this. We look lots at how dogs respond to stress hormones like cortisol. But actually, we now wanted to look at the flip side of it, how actually the dogs react to happy hormones, how they react to oxytocin and how that can help build a bond and also help develop a dog’s work. Relationship. So there’s lots of research to be done there. As I said, we we create really happy environments for our dogs to work in and for them to really enjoy their job. And there is obviously the relationship between the dogs, the trainers and their volunteers are parallel to them being able to do this. So there’s there’s more into it. There is a lot more into it, but it all comes down to the dogs having a wonderful willingness to please and do their jobs.

Robin Daly
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, this kind of relationship between humans and dogs, pets as a whole actually, but particularly dogs has really come to the fore through Covid, isn’t it, where it’s been a lifesaver for a lot of people and people have come to appreciate their dogs in a way they didn’t before. All sorts of things have developed and the the importance that an animal can have in maintaining somebody’s wellbeing, both mental and physical, has now risen substantially as a result of that experience of Covid, isn’t it?

Sophie Aziz
Oh absolutely. We’re all, you know, fairly doggy people here at the best of times. I can imagine. Yeah. Definitely in the wrong place if you don’t like dogs. Yeah, right. Being able to see the improvements that the dogs make for actually everyone within the charity. And I’m not just talking about the people that we help with assistance dogs or the research that we do in developing clinical trials so that we can look at fast or rapid diagnosis of disease, and obviously non-invasive diagnosis or triage. But just being able to see the effects that the dogs have on the community going out, being able to have access to, knowing that this work’s being done. Our incredible volunteers being able to build these bonds with their dogs and they love their job. And I take my house off to our volunteers because they have such a tough job with it. Our socializers have to take in young puppies which they know they’re going to have to give up at some point. Fosters who look after our biodetection dogs, they have to bring them in like it’s a school run. Every morning dropping them off, picking them up. The dedication to what we do from the whole community supporting the charity is just remarkable.

Robin Daly
Amazing. Yeah, and I was thinking like the other kind of scenarios we’ve seen dogs that were being clearly good for human health and wellbeing is introducing them to just having them around people who are sick, not detecting anything, but actually just being there. And particularly older people as well, you know, taking a dog into a care home can be a marvellous thing for the people who are there.

Sophie Aziz
Yes, absolutely. And this is actually one of the key themes of a future project that we have up and coming over the next year, which is looking at UTI detection in vulnerable patients. Yes, I read that. Brilliant. So it’s, and being able to have that benefit of patient wellbeing, of supporting mental health, giving them access to the physicality of touching a dog, of interacting with a dog, but also having the added benefit of early UTI detection, we think will be absolutely game-changing within support of healthcare.

Robin Daly
I think you’re right. I was just reading that and yeah, urinary tract infection for anybody who doesn’t know the acronym. These are terrible things for all the people because they lose the plot, they fall over, they break something, they’re in hospital and it can be the beginning of the roads dying for people, a urinary tract infection quite commonly. So yeah, to actually intervene in that early on is a major win in keeping them safe. So yeah, brilliant. Okay, nothing to do with this particular program, but really interesting. Okay, so can you tell us anything about the history of dogs and detection? I mean, who was the first person to realize really the dogs to do this and when, as far as we know?

Sophie Aziz
Oh, well, there’s research dating back for the last few decades over dog detection. The paper that we published at the BMJ was the first seminal paper from the UK to come out to show that dogs can really do this work. But there’s been anecdotal evidence of dogs being able to detect disease dating back for tens, hundreds of years. It’s very well understood that dogs can do this in terms of their support. What we needed to do as a charity was prove that they could do it and make sure that the research that we were putting in place really was at the highest standard to be able to show that there’s proper levels of robustness going in. All of our dogs have always been tested under double blind conditions so that we can make sure that we’re working through proper scientific rigor. And there’s no, you know, smoke and mirrors as to how this can be done because it’s very easy for obviously operant conditional responses to take place with dogs rather than true detection. And that’s what we always look for. We want to make sure that our dogs are working down to disease level at any point in time. So for us, this means making sure that we’re not just presenting our disease samples. So in the case of cancer, whether it’s disease, urine versus just purely healthy people, we want to make sure that there’s other comorbidities built in there that could be precancerous. And we want the dogs to be able to tell us about when they think that person starts to smell like it could be cancer versus other non-cancerous conditions. And that’s really the trick to it. So it’s a very difficult thing to do. And it’s very great in terms of what the gold standard is for testing otherwise outside of dogs. I mean, dogs have an incredible sense of smell. They have 10 times the number of olfactory receptors that humans do. We know from research that dogs can detect down to parts per trillion, which is the equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic sized swimming pools. Because they’re down to absolutely minute levels. But making sure they’re working at that can be quite tricky. And that’s where very careful training comes into play.

Robin Daly
Hmm. Interesting. Well, really pushing the envelope on this is great. Yeah. So, so, yeah, I think I’ve come across odd stories where there’s been, you know, one pet owner and the pet has been very insistent about some area of their body and they’ve eventually done, gone to get checked out and it’s turned out to be serious. And so I imagine those stories have been around for a long time, but it’s kind of the, the thing to overcome for human beings is listening to what our pets are saying, I think, because when I visited you, I have some strong memories of that visit. And one of them was of being in the, in the office, having a cup of tea afterwards, the demonstration. And one of the owners of a dog that helped her with her blood sugar levels was there. And this dog, as far as I was concerned, was just acting up, you know, flipping dogs or something, you know, it was just like pesky dog behavior, I would call it. But she immediately said, Oh yeah, it’s just telling me that my blood sugar levels are borderline, you know, and I wasn’t listening and she was, you know, and that’s the difference. And I can imagine this communication gap between animals and ourselves is something we need to overcome and realize how much information they could hold for us.

Sophie Aziz
Yes, absolutely. And that’s it’s another area of research that we do look into alongside of our medical detection is how we can improve our understanding of what the dog is doing when they’re sniffing and when they’re trying to tell us. So we’re also working with institutions like the Open University there. We called it our K9 interface project, which is basically looking at how AI can monitor and predict as to what the dog’s telling us and the differences between some figures. And this helps to build on our understanding of communications from the dog. But a lot of it is indescribable really. It’s this innate communication between an individual and their dog. But what we’re wanting to do is to try and extrapolate that to say, okay, well, how can we build on this? How can we look at what the dog is telling us and have that effect and impact hundreds, thousands, millions of people who may not have access to the dog. And some of this is building on our technological advances that we’ve been working with MIT and Johns Hopkins University in the US to look at creating artificial intelligence based off of the dog and the dog decisions about cancer, prostate cancer samples, which will then generate an AI to then be able to go into an e-nose, a more accurate electronic nose that can tell people the earliest dangers of prostate cancer. And that can then be extrapolated out for other conditions. So again, the individual relationship between a dog and an owner or a dog and its client, in our case for our assistance dogs, will never be replaceable. But what we can learn from the dog could go and help millions of people through artificial intelligence.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Anyway, it’s like I can see where we’ve always had this idea that communications with dogs were kind of one way. We tell them sit or whatever it was, fetch, and they didn’t say anything back, but that’s clearly not the case.

Sophie Aziz
No, very much not. And future research will hope to be able to open up this avenue of investigation, file law for us.

Robin Daly
Anyway, there’s a bit of a side issue here. I saw a study very recently again where they were training ants to detect Teamers. Did you see that one? Yeah

Sophie Aziz
Yes, it’s incredible. There’s been all sorts of different animals being involved in detection studies. There’s an organisation called Popo in South Africa who train rats for detection. Now these have been primarily trained for landmine detection, but they’ve also looked at disease detection, which is absolutely incredible.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s right. Landmines. That’s the news they made with that. You’re right. They just realised they could do other things as well. But anyway, this ant thing is fascinating to see how with ants you could train up an ant and it would go away and train the rest of the colony for you. You know, that’s that… It’s unwar efficient. I want you to do that with ants. Yeah, but I mean, that’s the nature of the kind of colony way of existing. So they pass information around like that. Anyway, I was interested now, there was a community of bio detection scientists who are sharing information across species. Is that happening?

Sophie Aziz
There is, so there are different, there are various cooperatives that go on throughout the years, where we meet, we talk about how animals are being used for detection. There’s a bigger community, particularly since COVID, where lots of other organisations thought, okay, well look, you know, we can train dogs to detect this, ourselves very much included, to look at how we can use dogs to help triage or identify those who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic with COVID. So there is definitely a growing community looking at this, looking at how animals can be used. And obviously it’s supported by organisations like Assistance Dogs International, who have a history of using dogs in more traditional assistance dog sense, but also want to look at furthering research and our understanding of the bonds between people and dogs.

Robin Daly
Right, okay. So that kind of leads me into what I wanted to talk about a bit. I came away from my visit to your centre with, I’m very impressed, but also enormously frustrated because I knew firsthand about the massive and I mean massive problem with none or misdiagnosis in the UK. I mean, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible problem that people get turned away over and over again, going back to their GP to say there’s something wrong, or they get completely incorrect diagnosis. And these things lead people to have advanced cancer by the time they’re finally diagnosed. So I’ve been aware of that for a long time. And despite the fact since then, it’s been recognised at government level that this is a huge problem in the UK. It’s still a huge problem. It’s causing an immense number of lives. So there you are with a simple, safe, cheap, effective way of cutting those numbers. And yet, largely, there’s kind of apathy and disinterest in the face of, you know, we got this epidemic of cancer, which, you know, puts COVID in the shade, what’s happening in cancer, it really is an issue. And COVID was a minor issue comparatively. So, do you think there’s any light ahead for increased interest in, you know, the proper interest that it should be in your work?

Sophie Aziz
I think there is I think we’ve we’re incredibly lucky as a charity that we do have Some incredible incredibly strong support from different factions of the medical community. Okay within NHS So support is growing and this is across the board really It doesn’t make it any less difficult for us to get projects through ethics for us to be able to convince Committees that what we’re wanting to do is going to be impactful And really worthy of what we’re doing. So there’s still there’s still difficulties in terms of us carrying out robust clear research And there are difficulties as well with training dogs to detect cancer. It’s incredible. The cancer specifically is very difficult It’s you need to have dogs with the right kind of personality And as you said early detection of the cancer can be very problematic So for those studies we always want dogs who very much will tell us when we’re on who are really adamant and convinced that They know the answer right because that’s what will help us look more at early diagnosis And obviously backed up with chemical analysis so we can look at volatile or gab compound patterns and we can We can see we can try and identify what the dogs are sniffing will help to inform early diagnosis We know as an organization, it’s never going to be realistic to have a cancer detection dog in every clinic The cost of training and cost of maintaining those dogs would be would be incredibly high And maintaining levels of accuracy for trained dogs is also has its complications Mmm, we always need samples to keep training on but this is where for cancer specifically and other conditions, but at the minute we’re really facing cancer the development of Artificial intelligence to be able to better inform early diagnostic tools so we can still have Earlier rapid non-invasive diagnosis will really work wonders or really? Hopefully change the field of early cancer diagnosis As I said, we’ve done lots of work with Johns Hopkins University and MIT in the US for prostate cancer detection We’re about to start our trial on Chorectal cancer detection Hopefully looking to identify Chorectal cancers through urine samples obviously they’re much easier to obtain from people and vehicle samples Sure, and look to see if we can get earlier diagnosis through that way

Robin Daly
Interesting, interesting. So that thing you said about the cost of having a trained dog and maintaining a trained dog, I’m just setting it myself against the costs of late diagnosis of cancer. Personally, I would put money on the fact that actually is much, much cheaper. Not only would it save the health service massive amounts of money in trying to treat people who are actually beyond treatment, but also, of course, the win in terms of our population would be also massive because early stage cancer is not the enemy that a late stage cancer is. We have quite a high success rate in helping people. So to me, one of the things that we’re up against here is not actually the cost. We don’t do dogs here, mentality. There is a little bit of that still. Actually conceding that dogs far better than we are at doing a job is an obstacle. To me, it’s on a par with the area I work in. It’s on a par with we don’t do mushrooms, vitamin C, curcumin, CBD. We don’t even do exercise. In fact, we don’t do a whole raft of other straightforward, safe, natural approaches that are readily to hand and have got the potential to offer life changing support to people with cancer. So that barrier, which says that basically if humans didn’t create it, if it hasn’t got patent and no one can take the credit for it, it doesn’t happen. What are any thoughts about overcoming that barrier? Because I think that’s not an insignificant part of the whole mix.

Sophie Aziz
No, it’s not an insignificant part. And, and, you know, part of looking at the, at the AI route for cancer detection and looking at developing, more developing, reliable, electronic noses is to improve accessibility. You know, there are, there are certain cultures, and demographics of people who wouldn’t be accepted without coming into clinic to sniff them. Sure. And it’s something that we have to overcome. And we have to think about, okay, well, look, how, what’s appropriate here for the dogs to be able to detect and how can we best use them? Now, if we’re collecting samples, taking them back to our training rooms and having the dogs screen them there, then obviously there’s, it’s still non-invasive. We’re just asking for a sample. It’s slightly more time consuming than having a five-second sniff within with a dog directly sniffing a person. But we know we get a slightly better reliability from some collected samples as opposed to what we refer to as passive search. There are cultural boundaries to get over. There is still the stigma about dogs being used in this role. We’re more than accepting for dogs to be able to check baggage and look for explosives. Yeah, that’s right. How can you use that? In traditional searches. But there, there is a bit of a jump still to trusting dogs for this diagnosis. But we have proved that it can be done. If we look at our medical health assistance dogs and what we’ve done for the POTS, which is again, pastoral orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, the people who suffer from this condition have no medical or clinical way of detecting the onset of a collapse. There is nothing else that a doctor can provide them to say you are about to collapse. Our dogs can give between a three and five minute warning for that person to be able to get to say they can’t stop the clapping happening, but they can allow them to get somewhere safe. So we know it’s effective. And our dogs do that with over 90% reliability. It’s an incredible.

Robin Daly
So just to put that in context okay, so I would say the medicine also can’t detect whether someone’s at high risk of having cancer in a few seconds with a quick sniff of a dog. They’ve got nothing anywhere near approaching that in terms of diagnostics that could do that same thing for a large population. I agree that there are cultural barriers to overcome, but I think we need to look at it from both sides. Yeah, putting yourself up for having a dog to diagnose you. But on the other side, the positives of the vast number of people that are being screened will be sent away and told and they’ll be quite confident that they haven’t got cancer. So what a major win that would be for society, for people to actually not be worrying all the time.

Sophie Aziz
I mean, absolutely. What we do as an organization is we utilize the dogs as a mechanism for triage. We want to be able to identify. We would always recommend that a person follows up with other testing. But really, I mean, if we look at it in the case of prostate cancer, the potential for the use of dogs or a machine learning AI that has learned from the dogs, that has the potential to help millions of people and replace the highly unreliable PSA testing. Thank you for saying that. And that’s what we want to do. We want to be able to have a more reliable form of the pre-screening, really.

Robin Daly
So there they are. They’ve been relying for decades on the PSA test. I’m just going to use that as an example because it’s so bad really. I think we can confidently say it’s created an overtreatment disaster in its time due to its inaccuracy. The figures for men who have received life-changing radical treatment completely unnecessarily is probably well into the millions at this point. So there we are. We’ve got something a lot more reliable and a lot less invasive just to check out from everybody what their status is. Now you’ve actually just run a trial around prostate cancer. So can you give us some results from your trial?

Sophie Aziz
Yes, absolutely. So we, we trial two dogs that are looking at Gleason 6 and 9 prostate cancer. And this was in collaboration with MIT. So they also concurrently ran the same samples with various other forms of early, of potential early diagnosis, including microbiome and as well as allogaric compound structures. So running it through gasket retrography and respiratory.

Robin Daly
before you go on to say everybody’s clear. So there they’re looking at person’s gut health and the contents of their microbiome in their gut. And the volatile organic compounds are, these are the smells coming off people, essentially. These are what the dogs are looking for, correct?

Sophie Aziz
Yes, or at least we think so. I mean, the combination of what the dogs are looking for, we always say that when it comes to VOCs for the dogs, it would appear from the comparison that we’ve done between the dog results and the chemical analysis, is that when it comes to the patterns of volatile organic compounds, the absence of certain VOCs is actually as important as a presence. it’s the pattern really that we’re wanting to see as to what the dogs are picking up on, and if there’s trends with that. Okay, sorry to interrupt, carry on. Okay, the dogs were shown to be highly effective. They had, I’ve got to remember the head now in terms of what we had, I think it was well over, it was only 70% sensitivity and specificity. approximately 75% reliability or accuracy overall for the detection. And this was looking at, let’s say Gleason 6 or Gleason 9 prostate cancers, confirmed prostate cancers versus what we call complex controls. So cancer negative samples, but with other conditions, other precancerous conditions in there. Right. nd the work that we’re currently doing on prostate cancer, and the only one from that study, is looking at longitudinal samples. So samples collected from the same people over a number of years, who are either under surveillance or in remission for prostate cancer. what we’re wanting the dogs to do there is to tell us as to when they think somebody may start to smell like cancer, or when they think they stop smelling like cancer.

Robin Daly
Interesting. So this is a bit more like somebody would have been going on having regular PSA tests to monitor how things are going. So it’s a monitoring process you’re trying to put in place rather than on-off diagnosis.

Sophie Aziz
Essentially, yes. The samples for our longitudinal study were collected by Milton Keynes University Hospital over a number of years. The gentlemen who were participating in this study were undergoing those monitoring PSA tests. We also had samples from them at the same time to then be able to say as to, okay, well, what do the dogs think of these samples at this point in time?

Robin Daly
But the dogs, in terms of their feedback, do they have anything in between on and off? Do they have just a binary response to everything they’re presented with, or are there in-betweens?

Sophie Aziz
No, and this is where it can get a bit complicated because although we, we ask for a bit of a binary, want a yes or a no, we want a yes or a no on every sample, including the negatives, and this is how we can make sure that we’re really understanding, um, true, true response. But the dogs do give us what we refer to as either partial indications, hesitations, or showing interest. these responses represent a real gray area and what we need to understand, which is where, or either side of work, looking at the behavioral, um, responses of dogs and what information we can, we can gather from, um, from again, looking at, uh, sensory interfaces between the dogs. We’ll give us more information as to what the differences are between true negative, true positive, false negative, false positive, uh, responses, and what the behavioral patterns look like. We always want to shape a dog’s natural response. if they’re showing interest, if they’re showing a hesitation, when they’re all not quite sure on that, it may be that there’s something else in the mix, it may be that it’s an incorrect diagnosis. Um, it may be in, in cancer, maybe pre-cancerous, but at the time tested as negative, and this is what we want to see really. that’s why the, we call the gray area of response is really important to what we’re doing because this will help to inform us. If that person later goes on to have cancer, we could use that as potentially an indicating factor that actually the dog was concerned about this person before they were deemed cancer, deemed cancerous by conventional testing.

Robin Daly
Right. Interesting. Yeah. So that’s right. There could be a lot more to be learned about what they can tell us in fact than yet to actually know that somebody is precancerous. They’re heading towards it even better because heading that off is of course a very small deal compared with treating cancer.

Sophie Aziz
Absolutely. I mean, we’ve got a lot more work to do on this in terms of, at the moment, we only have quite a small sample set to be working on. So there’s certainly more work to do before we can draw any finite conclusions on it. But that’s really the hope to be able to see as to whether we can look at those patterns.

Robin Daly
Okay, so you mentioned false positives, false negatives. Do you want us to say a little bit more about what you found out in relation to this trial to do with prostate cancer?

Sophie Aziz
The false positives and the false negative responses that we get in any trial are really important to us as well, because we want to be able to look at agreement between dogs. And if we, a dog may get it wrong, they will, no, no testing mechanism is perfect and the dogs will maybe have updates or there may be something else in the picture that they’re picking up on. And this is where actually we still have some uncertainty about what the dogs specifically are looking at in that cancer picture, which we need to have a better understanding of. And that’s where concurrent chemical analysis and the canine sensory interface helps to give us more information about this. But a dog may get something wrong, but if two dogs get something wrong and we have agreement between that cell, that’s where it gets really interesting, if more dogs get agreement. we have, we had a case actually when we were looking at, it was early on in our bladder cancer study, we had a lovely dog called Tangle who was ardently indicating on what should have been a negative sample, a negative urine sample for bladder cancer. I’m very, very convincing. This sample absolutely is positive for bladder cancer without it now. Went back to the collaborators and said, well, can we have a bit more information about this sample, this person? It turned out actually that the person had an undiagnosed kidney cancer.

Sophie Aziz
again, it’s anecdotal, but there’s certainly evidence to say that there’s other things going on and built into the picture.

Robin Daly
They know a lot more than we do.

Sophie Aziz
Well, what we don’t know yet is as to whether there’s a common cancer smell that the dogs are picking up on that will allow them to, with these commonalities in the volatile organic compound profiles that the dogs are picking up on or whether actually there are specific cancer smells, a specific cancer for kidney cancer.

Sophie Aziz
Well, that was something I was going to. talk about you because I noticed that the ant guys were heading towards the idea they could be a way of detecting cancer full stop using hands and of course if you had to go around you know training animals especially for every single kind of cancer well that’s a big deal you know and of course from a screening point of view well you may not be nearly as effective as well if you can screen for cancer man that is a big deal doesn’t it so do you how likely do you think that is

Sophie Aziz
there’s certainly scope for it in terms of, and there’s an argument for both sides of this in terms of, okay, what if we have a specific cancer screening, then it helps us to identify the problem sooner without that person having to go through potentially multiple invasive tests to find out actually where the cancer’s located. So in some ways it’s really helpful. Or if you’ve got some commonalities in a different cancer, you know, whether there’s likely some commonalities between kidney and bladder cancers, especially prostate cancer, purely because the location in the organs from where the sample comes through may have contact with a tumor that then helps to give us the cancer smell coming out in the urine. But there are organizations out there who are looking at more generalized cancer screening. And there’s certainly an argument to say that by doing that, by having a general, okay, this is, you have been indicated for a cancer, but we’re not sure what, it’s still helpful. It still means that those people who may be under surveillance otherwise will have a family history of cancers may have a better chance of knowing when to go and start getting looked at or to follow up with their clinical teams. There’s definitely an argument for both sides of the court on a really…

Robin Daly
I see that. Yeah, absolutely. The overall cancer test could be a great thing for at least alerting people to the fact they need to do something, but you’re right. You’ve then got a journey to find out exactly what it is, and it may not be obvious. But you can see how dogs can help with both, and certainly a test that told you about cancer as a whole would be enormously informative in terms of telling us where we’re at and whether we’re at risk full stop. Because at the moment, people actually, you hear people who’ve got shed loads of money, who are concerned about their cancer risk, they just spend on this scan, this test, this, oh, you know what I mean? There’s so many things you could test for that could go wrong. It’s like you just have to be neurotic to be pursuing that route. So just to have a single way of knowing whether we’re somebody who could well have cancer or not, would be also massively informative and helpful. Alright, so yeah, just to come back in. So just looking again at, so you’re pursuing these two lines, like one of them is working directly with the dogs, and the other one is trying to replicate what they do. You’re working with these various universes and things to try and do that. And maybe you can tell us a bit about how far along that’s come the replicating the dogs functionality in with the machine.

Sophie Aziz
Yes, so there’s been very promising work in terms of our dogs being able to demonstrate to the algorithm and train an algorithm that will then go onto a Eno’s development. There is approach type Eno’s in place that needs some further testing but it’s looking really promising that this can be something that can go out and really make a significant difference and the point of having an Eno is really to be able to improve accessibility and affordability and access to this early screening care and this is for as you were saying there are so many people who go and spend thousands on private health care for scans for this and that to try and get down to group causes or to try and see by having a transportable highly accurate non-invasive early screening Eno is a machine to be able to do this means that there’s better accessibility for everyone to be able to get this and it isn’t reliant on having to have highly trained dogs and very highly trained staff manning dogs in every clinic so improvement of accessibility is really at the core of this.

Robin Daly
I see that. The other way it’s going to improve accessibility probably is because it doesn’t suffer from the we don’t do dogs here syndrome. Some example is invented, it’s probably got a patent. It’s a very clever bit of technology, uses AI, blah, blah, blah. And it sounds like a scientific thing where a dog doesn’t. And so it’s probably, if you don’t excuse the expression, got more legs there. So in terms of the medical profession.

Sophie Aziz
I mean there is that there is obviously the perception of a machine doing it over a dog there are logistic as I said Previously, there are logistical issues in terms of having trained dogs Fully available and it may well be that you know having Screening services from neurons with dogs may well still be a viable option with this but having a An accessible machine, you know, the more they use the cheaper.

Robin Daly
It makes sense. Yeah, it’s great.

Sophie Aziz
It overcomes some of the barriers there’s certainly there will and we’re you know, we’re not trying to replace ourselves with with AI and technology The the aim of every charity is to get to a point where you’re no longer needed But yeah, there will always be a place for dogs to be able to work in this field and it’s it’s that scalability of of What’s necessary we know from a medical assistance dogs at the one-on-one relationship is absolutely paramount for those people with complex conditions We know from our work with COVID and what we’re hoping to see with our UTI work that having Dogs out in the environment out out in care homes in community settings Directly certain people where so we have a one-to-many ratio Will have value we’ve already seen that And then being able to also develop AI technologies helps to increase that That scalability in that rate of which we can help people eat them more Yeah

Robin Daly
Okay, well, from my point of view, what I’d love to see is that what you already have is adopted fully and used fully while they’re developing the AI and the clever stuff, because it’s not there yet, and why are we all waiting and dying from cancer, meanwhile? So we should get on and use what we got. But anyway, the world is as it is, and medicine is as it is, and anyway, I wish you the very best of the work you’re doing to actually push this science forward, because we desperately need it. And it’s good science. So yeah, a big kudos to your charity for being such a key player in advancing things in this area.

Sophie Aziz
Thank you so much and thank you for talking about this. Thank you for having us to be able to talk about the, I mean I’m biased, but the incredible work that we get to do on a daily basis. It’s incredibly humbling to be able to do this work and to have the potential to help so many people.

Robin Daly
Thank you, Sophie.

Sophie Aziz
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Robin Daly
Isn’t nature extraordinary? With cancer, we need all the help that we can get. So where better to go than man’s best friend? I really do hope the efforts of medical dissection dogs get the recognition and reap the rewards they deserve very soon. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to introducing you to another expert guest from the world of integrative medicine for cancer next week in another Yes to Life show. Goodbye.