Prostate Cancer Detection Dogs At Work

Medical Detection Dogs is proud to work alongside the esteemed patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. She first became patron of MDD in 2014 when she was Duchess of Cornwall. In this time she has seen many Bio Detection Dogs at work such as cancer detection dogs at Clarence House, Covid-19 detection dogs at MDD HQ and Paddington Station.

The work of fox red Labrador, Florin and Hungarian wired-haired Vizsla, Midas, could pave the way for an urgently needed, more accurate and non-invasive method of early prostate cancer diagnosis which could support the current most widely used test – the PSA blood test. MDDs' results are so encouraging because one of the challenges of that test is that other conditions can cause an elevated PSA but that does not necessarily mean you have cancer. This ground-breaking work now has the potential to be translated to an electronic device thanks to a collaboration with a quantum physicist at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Professor of Chemistry at The University of El Paso with those experts using our dogs’ data to build that technology.

Dr Andreas Mershin, Founder and Chief Science Officer of RealNose.AI says: “The work of MDD made me change my entire MIT laboratory’s research direction. It has made it clear that robust, scientifically unassailable evidence has been elaborately checked and well-presented showing that it is possible and indeed useful to train canines to diagnose disease via scent. Over the next two decades we continue to learn from the canine behavioral protocols developed at MDD how to create technologies that can detect and learn scents just like the dogs. The impact of MDD’s work is foundational and seminal to a whole new slew of emergent technologies.”   (Credit from MDD.org.uk)