Pink tongue drawn, pointed ears, caramel legs ready to pounce … “Go, search”. It will take Nykios no more to sink his smoky muzzle into four strange stainless steel cones, aligned in an unpretentious prefab. In front of the third, the Belgian shepherd pauses and then sits down. Behind him, Cécile Mansuy displays a big smile, congratulating him with a ration of kibble. However, the 31-year-old educator is not surprised. Because his Malinois is a star! Thanks to his unparalleled flair, this dog capable of detecting breast cancer by sniffing its smell on a wipe. Dizzying, yes.
His training – daily -, this strong head does it a stone’s throw from the vineyards of Champagne, in a bucolic cynophile center of Champvoisy (Marne). There, he works side by side with experts, like Labrador Nougaro, the group’s other cador, and the three newcomers in training: Odin, Oups and Owen.
“No contact with the patient”
If the canine army is strengthening, it is that after four years of exercise of its soldiers, there is no longer any doubt that they know how to smell tumors (+ 90% success). “Now we have to move from proof of concept to method. The dog is capable, but is it constantly and repeatedly? This is what we have to demonstrate scientifically, ”says Pierre Bauër, engineer and head of the KDog project led by the Institut Curie, a world reference in the fight against the disease. So, we are announcing, the Paris center is starting the very first clinical trial for the detection of breast cancer by sweat. In two years, 450 women, half of whom are not sick, will be called upon to participate. Two have just been included.
“There is no contact between the patient and the dog,” anticipates Pierre Bauër, who is broken at this question. The pooches only work with compresses that a woman has kept all night against her breasts, thus charging them with sweat. The whole is put in jars, brought to Champvoisy. There, they pass under the seasoned truffle of Nykios and his comrades. Their sense of smell is a million times better than ours. “But if they passed you on the street, they wouldn’t sniff you,” continues the engineer. The dog learns to act within a specific framework, always with the objective of receiving a reward, a treat or a game. ”
VIDEO. With cancer sniffer dogs
This Monday morning, Didier Valentin, the animal lover with whom he worked 32 years in the army, decided to make the Nougaro exercise more difficult. In cones, it places only cancer-negative wipes. The canine has nothing to flush out, which makes it very difficult for him, in search of a grail named baballe.
Energetic, playful but also stubborn, the black-haired labrador will respond with a good nose. He understands that the smell is completely absent and will sit on a carpet to signify “no tumor here”. “Here, that’s good, very very good,” flatters him, not a little proud, his 59-year-old educator. The stunning scene is promising because it shows that the animal is able to cope with different situations.
“It is not a question of replacing mammograms”
And yet, the bet was far from being won when Isabelle Fromantin decided to raise it. It was this adventurous nurse, specialist in tumor wounds, who had the intuition – the smell, it would have to be said – that the odorous volatile compounds could act as a diagnostic tool.
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“It is not a question of replacing mammograms,” she warns. But a kind of pretest that can benefit many women, reluctant to mammo, but also those who have difficulty accessing it because they are disabled or geographically isolated. “At the start, I was called back with my dog stories. We sent them to detect luggage, airports, bomb alerts, avalanches but breast cancer, on a scientific level, it seemed far-fetched! She remembers. Finally, the project was launched, no joke, on April 1, 2016 thanks to funding from Curie and a call for donations.
“With the clinical trial, we are reaching a higher milestone,” she is aware. You cannot predict the outcome, a dog is not a tool. As proof, a recent change in size of compresses that has disturbed canines. Other models have been ordered in China, but the factory is shutdown due to… coronavirus!
But by the way, what do they feel Oops, Nougaro and the others? What does cancer smell like? “This is the whole question, and it is fascinating. We know it has one, the dogs spot it, but we don’t know which one, ”concedes Pierre Bauër. This Thursday, February 20, new samples left from Curie to the Institute of Criminal Research of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) which is working on the issue. Defining the smell is pan 2 of KDOG.
In Tenon, an identical project with the prostate
If the breast test is successful, dogs may be interested in ovarian cancer. All over the world, tests are multiplying: lungs, cervix … Women are not the only ones concerned. In France, Professor Olivier Cussenot, urologist at Tenon Hospital, in Paris, has been studying the subject for ten years with dogs trained to spot prostate cancer from urine. Looping, its star, was even crowned “dog-hero”. Like Nykios, he received his medal in the salons of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris! “At the same time, we are looking at the development of the artificial nose. The next step, explains the doctor, will be to compare the results between the animal and the technology. Studies will begin in September. But so far, no one has managed to do better than man’s best friend.
Dogs need a lot of samples to train, including “healthy” samples. To participate, you must be of full age, with no history of cancer and with a negative mammogram of less than six months. You can request a kit with compresses at [email protected]
They are giant and not very tasty. And yet, Gambian rats, their real name savannah cricetome, are true allies in the fight against tuberculosis, one of the most deadly infectious diseases in the world. Since 2007, the Belgian NGO Apopo has been training rodents for nine months to detect the smell of the bacteria causing the pathology thanks to … sputum (work on urine is underway). In Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia, Apopo trains rats to say in minutes if the disease is there, when it takes several days for a laboratory to reach its verdict.
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