August 1, 2024 – For Dr. Cindy Otto, hemangiosarcoma is a personal enemy. Dr. Otto spent the first 20 years of her career in the emergency room and has seen this deadly cancer up and close and personal.
“There wasn’t a week that went by when I didn’t see a dog with hemangiosarcoma,” said Dr. Otto. “The devastation of the disease is so deep and so personal. It became even more personal as I began working more with service and other working dogs, and I saw these wonderful dogs die of hemangiosarcoma. That was really hard.”
It was natural as part of her work with these dogs that she encountered individuals trained to sniff out substances such as explosives and drugs, something dogs had been doing for decades. Her work also coincided with a new development in human medical diagnostics – using dogs to detect odors associated with disease.
Would it be possible, Dr. Otto thought, to train dogs to detect her old foe, hemangiosarcoma?
The science behind the detection of disease is simple, but the training is the tricky part. All living creatures produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which are released through the skin, in body fluids and in the breath. Many things can alter VOCs, from the food we eat to diseases of all kinds.
For thousands of years, people have recognized that certain diseases can cause a distinctive odor – for example, the acetone smell of diabetic ketoacidosis, or the ammonia smell of kidney disease.
Researchers are just learning about the VOCs that are produced by specific diseases, such as cancer, or infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and COVID. VOCs could be a great way to detect disease in an early stage, or in the absence of sophisticated laboratory equipment. All it takes is a keen sense of smell to detect these VOC signatures – and the smarts to learn what is important.
A VOC of interest is one in a soup of odors, and it takes a lot of training and focus for a dog to find a particular VOC. And if the sample comes from another dog, does that add another layer of complexity to the process? And does hemangiosarcoma have a unique VOC (or set of VOCs) that set it apart from other diseases?
In her new Foundation-funded project, Dr. Otto will try to answer these questions. She’s using blood samples from Golden Retriever Lifetime Study dogs with confirmed hemangiosarcoma to train dogs to detect the cancer. She’s going to supplement the Study samples with samples she’s collected either at the University of Pennsylvania or those sent in by thousands of veterinarians from around the country, from dogs with hemangiosarcoma, those with other diseases and samples from healthy dogs. Dr. Otto will then see if dogs can discriminate between the three types of samples. She hopes to get at least 300 blood samples from dogs with hemangiosarcoma and 600 samples from dogs without hemangiosarcoma. The Study samples are of special interest.
“What we love about the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study samples is that we’ve got not only a great history on these dogs but we have sequential samples,” said Dr. Otto. “The data is really clean.”
The ultimate goal is not to have a trained dog in every diagnostic laboratory but to determine what VOC, or combination of VOCs, these dogs are finding and then leveraging that data into a diagnostic test that can be mechanized.
“Everybody has a story about this horrible disease,” added Dr. Otto. “If there is a way that we can do something to help dogs, then we should do it.”
The Foundation has a long history of hemangiosarcoma research. We’ve made progress but not enough – there’s so much more work to do. We launched our Hemangiosarcoma Initiative to provide resources to veterinary scientists, like Dr. Otto, working to find new ways to diagnose and treat this terrible cancer.
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Resources:
Fresh Scoop Podcast Episode 52: New Ideas on Hemangiosarcoma in Dogs
Hemangiosarcoma: What Every Dog Owner Needs to Know and Research Insights with Dr. Antonella Borgatti
