Dr. Cliff Redford

You need chemotherapy.

And it's already spread to other organs, the liver and the heart being the key main ones that it spreads to.

So our ability to extend life is limited, maybe six months.

Sounds pretty grim.

You know, it's something you'd want.

Well, yes, absolutely.

Because there is a point where if the spleen is the first location, which normally it is, if you can detect it before it becomes malignant and spreads elsewhere, you can remove the spleen.

Dogs do very well without their spleen.

They're less sensitive without it than, say, we are.

It doesn't affect their immune system the same way.

And then you're not only avoiding the rupturing of the spleen, but you're avoiding this tumor from spreading.

So, they needed to see, does hemangiosarcoma have an odor?

And what they did was they took a series of 12 blood samples from dogs with known hemangiosarcoma and trained the dogs to, hey, if you sniff this, we're going to give you a treat kind of thing.

And then they did a proper...

blinded, double-blinded placebo-controlled study.

And they had, again, 12 samples of different hemangiosarcoma cases, 12 samples of non-cancerous but unhealthy dogs.

They had some other illness.

And then 12 samples from completely healthy dogs.

And the groups of dogs that they were training ended up with 70% accuracy detected the blood from the dogs that had hemangiosarcoma.

And that 70% accuracy, which, I mean, that's not great, but it's good for an initial screening.