Exclusive | New home test can detect cancer thanks to adorable puppies who sniff it out at lab

Howl-elujah!You’ve probably heard that dogs can be trained to sniff out cancer. Now, Israeli startup SpotItEarly is harnessing that remarkable ability — along with groundbreaking technology — to launch medicine’s next secret weapon.The biotech company is developing a revolutionary at-home cancer screening test that’s part pup, part AI.Here’s how it works: You order a test that arrives at your door, breathe into a high-tech mask that resembles an N95 for three minutes and mail the sample to SpotItEarly’s lab. There, a team of professionally trained dogs will give it a good sniff — and if there’s any cancer present, they’ll know.“Our dogs are natural workers and love being mentally stimulated by their sense of smell.Training them to detect odors wasn’t a challenge; it is in their nature,” Shlomi Madar, CEO of SpotitEarly, told The Post. “With around 250-300 million receptors, a dog’s sense of smell is estimated to be between 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human’s.

That is what makes them highly effective for scent-based tasks, such as those in police forces or for detecting diseases in humans.”According to Madar, the dogs make their diagnosis by detecting cancer odor signatures in a patient’s volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — biological information from the blood in our lungs that travels into the air we exhale.As incredible as these pup-fessional super-sniffers are, the real magic happens when canine intelligence meets artificial intelligence.“As the detection dogs are sniffing the samples in the lab, we use our proprietary AI platform, LUCID, to track and analyze their physiological and behavioral signals, collecting thousands of data points per second,” Madar explained. “LUCID will generate a positive lab result if a cancer signature is identified in a sample.This fusion of advanced technology with the extraordinary olfactory abilities of canines enables each sample to be screened in a fraction of a...