The Pine Street Foundation was recently featured in an article in Parade Magazine.

Click here to read the entire article: “Cancer In America: Sniffing Out Disease”

If you want to support an organization fighting breast cancer, you might want to know about the little known but extraordinary Pine Street Foundation. While everyone wants to detect breast cancer as early as possible, the Pine Street Foundation has been developing a remarkable alternative to mammograms.

Click here to read the entire article: “Greed, Cancer and Pink KFC Buckets”

Click here to listen to the interview

Published in “People Magazine” August 17, 2009

At first glance, cancer researcher Michael McCulloch’s lab at the Pine Street Foundation in San Rafael, Calif., looks predictably humdrum — a computer, a few beakers and some vials. And yet, if you look a little closer, there’s something downright peculiar about the place. Most notably, the water bowls, leashes and the roll of paper towels used for sopping up slobber.

For the past 10 years, McCulloch, an acupuncturist by training, has been exploring whether the sensitive nose of his furry, four-legged research subjects can detect cancer. And after hearing accounts of canines that reportedly saved the lives of their human owners by sniffing, pawing and barking at their tumors (long before being diagnosed by a physician), he has been grappling with a thought-provoking theory: If a dog can do that spontaneously, that suggests they can be trained to do it.

The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, insists Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society’s deputy chief medical officer. “An enormous amount of research is being done to find those proteins present in small quantities in the bloodstream that may signal cancer,” Lichtenfeld tells PEOPLE. “That a dog could smell these is definitely within the realm of possibility.”

McCulloch first became aware of the concept that certain diseases can be detected in a person’s breath from an ancient medical text in the early 1980s while studying acupuncture in Taiwan and mainland China. In 2003, he and his colleagues at the Pine Street Foundation began collecting breath samples from nearly a hundred lung and breast cancer patients. Next, they went to work developing a technique to train a group of dogs to sniff out the samples in much the same way law-enforcement personnel teach canines to use their noses to find narcotics and explosives.

What they learned was truly explosive. It turned out his canine research subjects and their sensitive noses could detect lung cancer 99 percent of the time and had an 88-percent accuracy rate for breast cancer. What McCulloch thinks the dogs are detecting is metabolic waste “from the tumor cells, which is chemically different from normal cells. The waste travels through the bloodstream and is exhaled out through the lungs.”

McCulloch recently began working on a follow-up study funded by the federal government and private donations. Last year, they began collecting breath samples from women recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, known as a particularly aggressive, fast-growing type of cancer cell rarely detected in its early stages. Once again, McCulloch and his team set out to determine if the dogs could be trained to accurately locate the samples — held in fist-sized plastic tubes — when hidden amongst four other similar tubes containing breath samples from healthy adults.

Although the full results of the study won’t be known until December, so far the canines have displayed uncanny accuracy. Which leads McCulloch to wonder if perhaps some day a woman’s breath sample might prove to be a more accurate and earlier way to detect ovarian cancer than the commonly used blood test or ultrasound.

“What does all this mean?” asks McCulloch. “I think part of the answer is that whenever you see dogs greeting each other out on the street, sniffing each other out, they’re probably asking a very simple question: ‘How’s your health today?’ “

Sniffing Out Cancer
by Amanda Robb

This article is from the June 2009 of O, The Oprah Magazine. Click here to read the entire article.

Everyone knows that dogs have great noses. We’ve put them to work detecting explosives, drugs, and missing people. Next assignment: sniffing out cancer.

Tessy, a yellow Labrador retriever, was destined to be a guide dog—she was born at the Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California, after all. But when an infection left her blind in one eye, Tessy had to leave the family business. Thankfully, she still had the asset dogs are famous for—her nose. And with it, she’s found a second career: sniffing out ovarian cancer in women.

The first medical journal to report on a dog behaving differently around an owner before the owner received a cancer diagnosis was The Lancet, which in 1989 described a woman whose border collie–Doberman mix wouldn’t stop sniffing her mole. Because of the animal’s persistence, she went to see a doctor, who identified the mole as a malignant melanoma. (The possibility isn’t as crazy as it sounds: Scientists have long known that tumors release tiny amounts of chemicals different than those of healthy tissue.) In the early 2000s, British researchers set out to test dogs’ sniffers. Using a method some police use to train bomb-detecting canines, they taught six dogs to identify the smell of bladder cancer in samples of patients’ urine. The dogs’ success rate wasn’t stellar—41 percent—but it was enough to support additional research.

Within the past decade, researchers at Pine Street Foundation, a nonprofit cancer education and research group in San Anselmo, California, have taught dogs to identify the smell of breast and lung cancer on patients’ breath. Their hope was that the biomarkers for cancer would be easier for the dogs to smell in the breath than in urine. The dogs were trained on breath samples that came from cancer patients; the sniffers earned a treat when they sat in front of the positive sample. “We think dogs are like people and perform best when they get positive feedback,” says Michael McColloch, PhD, director of research at the Pine Street Foundation. The results of the study, published in 2006 in Integrative Cancer Therapies, were remarkable: The dogs achieved a success rate of 88 to 99 percent.

When you consider how sensitive dogs’ noses are, the results aren’t surprising—the average canine can detect scents 10,000 to 100,000 times better than the average human. They can pick up the smells at about one part per trillion, the equivalent of, say, being able to sniff out a single drop of chlorine in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

The next step is training a new set of dogs—Tessy included—to detect ovarian cancer, an often elusive disease that when found early has much higher survival rates. So far, the Pine Street Foundation dogs have done 25,000 scent trials for ovarian cancer. The researchers are collaborating with scientists at the University of Maine, who are trying to mimic the dogs’ cancer-sniffing abilities with laboratory machines.

Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the Pine Street Foundation, foresees a time when women going in for annual physicals will give a Breathalyzer-like sample as routinely as they get their blood pressure taken or have a Pap smear. Whether the test tube that holds their breath samples will be sent away to a conventional lab or one that looks more like a dog run remains to be seen.

For now, the Pine Street canines work four hours a day, one day a week. “It’s a mix of serious work, playtime, and hanging out with people,” says McColloch. “These are all the things that get dog endorphins going.”

And Tessy’s schedule is much lighter than it would have been had she followed her original career path, says her owner, Paolo Pompanin, a master instructor at Guide Dogs for the Blind. It leaves her plenty of time for her other love—charging through powder on ski trips. “She jumps and jumps and jumps and jumps. She lets go completely.”

The Pine Street Foundation’s research on the early detection of cancer was featured on KQED’s “Quest” program on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008.

Dogs Excel on Smell Test to Find Cancer

Article originally published in the New York Times on January 17, 2006. Click here for the original article.

In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs – three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs – to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.

The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80′s that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue.

Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.

The near-perfection in the clinic’s study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, “is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing.”

As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued. Michael McCulloch, research director for the Pine Street Foundation in Marin County, Calif., and the lead researcher on the study, acknowledged that the results seemed too good to be true. (For breast cancer, with a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right about 88 percent of the time with almost no false positives, which compares favorably to mammograms.)

“Yes, we were astounded, as well,” Mr. McCulloch said. “And that’s why it needs to be replicated with other dogs, plus chemical analysis of what’s in the breath.”

He is applying for National Science Foundation grants to try just that, he said. The fact that the study was carried out by a clinic supported by the Pine Street Foundation that combines traditional chemotherapy with acupuncture and herbal medicine raised suspicions, as did the fact that it is to be published by a little-known journal, Integrative Cancer Therapies. (The journal published it online last year.)

But experts who read the study could not find any obvious fatal flaw in its methodology, and the idea that dogs can detect cancer is “not crazy at all,” said Dr. Ted Gansler, director of medical content in health information for the American Cancer Society. “It’s biologically plausible,” he said, “but there has to be a lot more study and confirmation of effectiveness.”

Dr. Berry, too, was interested but suspicious. “If true, it’s huge,” he said. “Which is one reason to be skeptical.”

Dr. Berry noted, half-jokingly, that Gregor Mendel, the 19th-century discoverer of the laws of genetics, also reported data on his crossbreeding of green and yellow peas that was too good to be true: he repeatedly came up with the perfect 3-1 ratios he predicted. “But we’ve forgiven Mendel and his gardener,” Dr. Berry added, “because his theory turned out to be right.”

In Mr. McCulloch’s study, the five dogs, borrowed from owners and Guide Dogs for the Blind, were trained as if detecting bombs. They repeatedly heard a clicker and got a treat when they found a desired odor in many identical smelling spots.

The clinic collected breath samples in plastic tubes filled with polypropylene wool from 55 people just after biopsies found lung cancer and from 31 patients with breast cancer, as well as from 83 healthy volunteers.

The tubes were numbered, and then placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog smelled cancer, it was supposed to sit.

For breath from lung cancer patients, Mr. McCulloch reported, the dogs correctly sat 564 times and incorrectly 10 times. (By adjusting for other factors, the researchers determined the accuracy rate at 99 percent.)

For the breath from healthy patients, they sat 4 times and did not sit 708 times.

Experts who read the study raised various objections: The smells of chemotherapy or smoking would be clues, they said. Or the healthy breath samples could have been collected in a different room on different days. Or the dogs could pick up subtle cues – like the tiny, unintentional movements of observers picked up by Clever Hans, the 19th-century “counting horse,” as he neared a correct answer. But Mr. McCulloch said cancer patients who had begun chemotherapy were excluded, smokers were included in both groups and the breath samples were collected in the same rooms on the same days. The tubes were numbered elsewhere, he said, and the only assistant who knew which samples were cancerous was out of the room while the dogs were working.

“The fact that dogs did this is kind of beside the point,” he said. “What this proved is that there are detectable differences in the breath of cancer patients. Now technology has to rise to that challenge.”

The next step, he said, will be to analyze breath samples with a gas chromatograph to figure out exactly which mixes of chemicals the dogs are reacting to.

Even if the dogs are accurate in repeat experiments, Dr. Gansler of the American Cancer Society said, it will be useful only as a preliminary scan. “It’s not like someone would start chemotherapy based on a dog test,” he said. “They’d still get a biopsy.”