Move FM Global News

LONDON, UK – Research is underway in London to see whether dogs can be trained to detect coronavirus in humans, even before symptoms appear.

Trials are planned to follow initial training where dogs will be able to smell coronavirus patients, and be tutored to detect those odours in people affected and unaffected.

Trials for the specially-trained dogs to be known as ‘COVID dogs’ are set to begin. The trials will establish whether dogs could be used as a potential new non-invasive, early warning measure to detect coronavirus in the future.

World-leading researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) will carry out the first phase of a trial in collaboration with the charity Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University. The British government has provided a grant of £500,000 of for the research. The aim is to determine whether dogs are able to detect coronavirus in humans from odour samples.

The trial brings together leading disease control experts from the universities with Medical Detection Dogs, who have already successfully trained dogs to detect the odour of many different diseases in humans, including cancer, malaria and Parkinson’s disease.

This new trial will look at whether the dogs, a mixture of labradors and cocker spaniels, can be trained to detect coronavirus in people, even if they are not showing symptoms.

“Bio-detection dogs already detect specific cancers and we believe this innovation might provide speedy results as part of our wider testing strategy,” the UK Minister for Innovation Lord Bethell said Saturday.

“Accuracy is essential so this trial will tell us whether ‘COVID dogs’ can reliably detect the virus and stop it spreading.”

If successful, researchers believe the dogs could provide a fast and non-invasive detection method alongside the government’s robust 5-pillar testing strategy. It is one of a number of testing measures being explored by the UK government.

The initial phase of the trial will see NHS staff in London hospitals collect odour samples from people who are infected with coronavirus and those who are uninfected. The 6 bio detection dogs will then undergo thorough training to identify the virus from the samples.

More than ten years of research gathered by Medical Detection Dogs has shown that the dogs, which could each screen up to 250 people per hour, can be trained to detect the odour of disease at the equivalent dilution of one teaspoon of sugar in 2 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water.

“Our previous work has shown that malaria has a distinctive odour, and with Medical Detection Dogs, we successfully trained dogs to accurately detect malaria. This, combined with the knowledge that respiratory disease can change body odour, makes us hopeful that the dogs can also detect COVID-19,” Professor James Logan, lead researcher for the work and Head of the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said Saturday.

“If successful, this approach could revolutionise how we detect the virus, with the potential to screen high numbers of people,” he added.

Medical Detection Dogs and the universities put forward a proposal for the clinical trial to the government, which hwas accepted on the strong evidence that the dogs can detect other diseases in humans with a high level of accuracy.

The dogs, the government said in a statement published on Saturday, will only be deployed if backed by strong scientific evidence and is part of the government’s approach to explore all possible options to tackle coronavirus.

Dr Claire Guest, Co-founder and CEO of Medical Detection Dogs, said:

“We have already demonstrated our expertise in canine disease detection by successfully training dogs to detect diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s and malaria, and we apply that same science to train life-saving Medical Alert Assistance Dogs to detect odour changes in individuals caused by their health condition.

We are sure our dogs will be able to find the odour of COVID-19 and we will then move into a second phase to test them in live situations, following which we hope to work with other agencies to train more dogs for deployment. We are incredibly proud that a dog’s nose could once again save many lives.”