UAMS Cancer Researchers Featured on VoiceAmerica
| May 12, 2015 | Two UAMS researchers who are examining dogs’ ability to sniff out thyroid cancer were the featured radio guests of the online broadcast Frankly Speaking About Cancer radio show, hosted by Kim Thiboldeaux, president and CEO of the Cancer Support Community, an online global network for cancer patients and their families.
Arny Ferrando, Ph.D. (left), and Donald Bodenner, M.D., Ph.D., answer questions about their research during a phone interview for the “Frankly Speaking About Cancer” radio program
The show broadcasts weekly on Tuesday afternoons on voiceamerica.com. To listen to the broadcast featuring UAMS go here.
Donald Bodenner, M.D., Ph.D., and Arny Ferrando, Ph.D., were invited on the program to discuss the research they presented at the ENDO 2015 in March in San Diego in which they found that scent-trained dogs show promise as a cancer detection tool, up to that point recording an 88 percent accuracy rate in determining whether a patient has thyroid cancer.
“It’s since gone up to about 91 percent in terms of the dog’s responses being accurate. In other words, 91 percent of the time he can tell whether you do or do not have cancer,” Ferrando said during the interview.
The research is particularly important to thyroid cancer because it’s so tricky, both to diagnose and to confirm its treatment, Bodenner said. That’s because certain thyroid nodules, even when the right tissue is taken for biopsy, simply can’t be assessed as benign or malignant. A patient might also have too many thyroid nodules to realistically biopsy. Oftentimes, though the chance of cancer may be very small, patients will opt for surgery knowing full well most such surgeries are unnecessary.
“This is a huge hole in our standard of care, to do surgeries when you know that almost all of them are going to be unnecessary,” said Bodenner.
“But there are nodules that simply can’t be diagnosed, or it’s very difficult to do so, and that’s where the dogs would be very helpful. If they could accurately give us an answer, then that would get rid of a large number of surgeries,” he said.
While not as lethal as many cancers, thyroid cancer is among the fastest growing cancers in terms of incidents reported around the world. Researchers estimate around 60,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.
Bodenner said one of the benefits of using dogs in diagnosis is the ability to export the technique to underserved areas where advanced techniques such as biopsy under ultrasound may not be possible.
“In low income or third world countries, if they could just supply urine and have that shipped they’d get an answer that way, I think that would be a tremendous improvement in affordable and approachable care to these underserved people.
The pair have partnered with Auburn University’s School of Veterinary Medicine to build a more robust data set, as well as work with dogs specifically bred for scent detection.
“The scientific and medical community only understands data, and having lots of data is really where I think we can separate ourselves from everybody else. We plan to look at hundreds of samples and are hoping to get data from that,” Ferrando said.
To grow the research, the two have turned to Consano, a nonprofit providing crowd funding for medical research. In time, they hope to grow the research from thyroid to other types of cancers.
“We’re looking at thyroid cancer mostly as a template, because there are several other cancers such as ovarian and pancreatic that are really lethal. They usually show up only when patients have stage 4 disease, and by that point cure is really tough. So in high-risk individuals, if we could have a screening system, even if it was 85 percent accurate, I think that would be a huge boon to medicine,” Bodenner said.