Penn Vet Working Dog Center<\/a> in South Philadelphia are training dogs to help detect hemangiosarcoma, a form of canine cancer.<\/p>\nThe dogs learn how to identify the cancer by smelling three boxes, with one containing a sample of malignant blood.<\/p>\n
“It really does feel like magic because I can’t smell anything from the samples. It’s a tiny drop of blood serum,” Clara Wilson, a researcher at the Working Dog Center, said. “We wanted to focus on hemangiosarcoma, which is a really devastating canine cancer.”<\/p>\n
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CBS News Philadelphia<\/p>\n
Hemangiosarcoma is a tumor that is often called the silent killer because it grows in the body and goes unnoticed until it’s too late.<\/p>\n
In the first phase of the research, the dogs identified the cancer 70% of the time. And when they get it right, they get a treat.<\/p>\n
Until now, the research primarily focused on human cancers, with the dogs being able to identify ovarian and pancreatic cancer.<\/p>\n
“Dogs are very unique because they have this incredible sense of smell,” Wilson said. “It just really does feel amazing and gives me a lot of respect for understanding that there’s a lot of things that I can’t understand that they’re picking up on.”<\/p>\n
Once the dogs identify the cancer, researchers look for markers in the samples that could eventually be used to create a test that would find the cancer early, when it’s more treatable.<\/p>\n
“The idea is that if dogs can smell something, that means that there’s a signal to detect,” Wilson said.<\/p>\n
These dogs are laying the groundwork for eventually being able to find cancer early and save lives for both humans and animals.<\/p>\n
The working dog center also trains dogs to detect drugs, bombs and alert for medical conditions.<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n
In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is new hope in the fight against a devastating cancer in dogs that is often deadly. Researchers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9328,49295,9356,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-101155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-cancer","tag-cancer-research","tag-dogs","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}