Dog Obsessively Sniffing Mom’s Breath Detected Lung Cancer–Now an E-Nose is Being Trained to Save More Lives | A Sign of Progress

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Colleen Ferguson says her German shepherd saved her life by detecting cancer in its earliest stages—and causing her to suspect something might be wrong when the dog kept obsessively smelling her breath.

For weeks, two-year-old Inca would sniff at her mouth and frown. The 60-year-old got her teeth checked, and doctors did tests related to her gluten intolerance, but they all came back negative.

Inca would not quit the habit, so the woman from Kent, England, decided to schedule a full body scan, which revealed a “golf ball sized tumor” in her left lung–it was stage one cancer.

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“She just had this focused intent on my mouth,” the former science teacher said. “She would give me such a look and walk away.”

“In no way did I expect lung cancer. It was such a shock because I am a non-smoker, and I had absolutely no symptoms at all, apart from being tired.”

After a surgery to remove the tumor Colleen didn’t need any further treatment or radiation, and she’s now making the most of her retirement years as a creative writer and published author.

“The surgeon told me, ‘we never catch it at stage 1, your dog has saved your life.

“I was just so lucky. To catch it that early was just remarkable. People need to listen to their dogs.”

Researchers in the UK have evidence that is proving that dogs can, indeed, detect cancer with their superior sense of smell.

The nonprofit Medical Detection Dogs began a groundbreaking study in 2024 to teach seven pooches—Labradors, cocker spaniels, and a retriever—how to detect tumors simply by smelling urine in pots.

“Dogs have shown us time and time again that diseases have an odor,” Claire Guest, the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer at Medical Detection Dogs, told The Times. “We are not sure whether that is the odor of the tumor itself, or the body’s response to the tumor.”

Clinical trials have proven that dogs can reliably detect diseases including prostate cancer, bladder cancer, Covid-19, and even Parkinson’s—and dogs can be trained to do so.

Now a machine nose is being developed at MIT

Scientists are now developing an ‘e-nose’ trained by artificial intelligence to replicate the dogs’ responses to cancer samples.

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In collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Andreas Mershin, has created the machine e-nose that uses chemical sensors to make it capable of “smelling” urine samples—and detecting the volatile organic compounds, which are tiny odor molecules in the air.

The e-nose is now being tested on 500 urine samples from patients at the Milton Keynes University Hospital near London, including some with prostate cancer and healthy controls, to see if it can accurately detect cancer.

Working with a chemistry team at the University of Texas at El Paso, Dr. Mershin hopes it will be approved as a clinical tool in hospitals within two years.

“This is a major milestone,” said Mershin. “We’ve worked to emulate the dogs’ abilities and train machines in a similar way—rewarding them for correct identifications.”

And such e-nose capabilities could ultimately be implemented into our smartphones. Our devices already have eyes and ears, and now technology with olfactory intelligence is the next frontier—informing a generation of non-invasive diagnostic tools for better health.

“It’s like giving our devices a new sense: a nose.”

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“When I trained our first cancer detection dog over 15 years ago, the goal was always to inform scalable technology—not to have a dog in every hospital,” said Ms. Guest. “Seeing that vision start to come to life with this E-nose is an incredibly proud moment.”

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