Alfie and Charlie are two four-month-old puppies that will soon change the world. It might surprise you - but these two are training to be "cancer detection specialists" at the University of California Davis Cancer Comprehensive Center.
A team comprising of veterinarians, physicians and animal experts from UC Davis and its community are currently training Alfie, a Labradoodle, and Charlie, a German Shepherd.
Have you seen Alfie and Charlie yet? These dogs will be sniffing out cancer at @UCD_Cancer! https://t.co/P1T9CzlNW5 pic.twitter.com/DMRUQo0JsF
— UC Davis (@ucdavis) August 24, 2015
The two puppies are learning to develop their skills and ability to detect the scent of cancer in urine, saliva, and human breath.
A dog naturally has over 220 million olfactory receptors in its nose, as compared to the measly five million in humans. This allows man's best friend to smell 10,000 to 100,000 times better than any human.
Sensory expert James Walker told PBS show NOVA: "If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well."
Alfie and Charlie will spend the next 12 months under "rigorous training." The training sessions are to be led by dog expert Dina Zaphiris, who has already trained dozens of dogs to recognize breast and ovarian cancer.
The two pups are trained not just to detect the cancer scent, but to ignore anything and everything else. Alfie and Charlie are also being trained to be highly sociable dogs, since their job description requires close contact with humans.
Alfie and Charlie are set to participate in a UC Davis clinical trial, where they will begin inspection on individuals starting early 2016.
It has long been established that in order to survive the battle against cancer, early detection is necessary. It has long been a struggle for the medical and technological field to find a reliable way to detect these potentially fatal diseases.
UC Davis Professor and physician Peter Belafsky notes, "Our new canine colleagues represent a unique weapon in the battle against cancer... the dogs' incredible talent for scent detection could offer us humans a real jump on diagnosing cancer much earlier and thus save many more lives."
Cancer detection through dogs then poses a solution to these problems, offering a less inexpensive, safe, and non-invasive way for cancer screening.
