Innovation Blog

Dogs Are Man’s Best Friend, and Cancer’s Worst Enemy: How Fido May Get Hossam Haick a Nobel Prize

By Shlomo Maital

  

 

  Fido:  Cancer Fighter???

Hossam Haick is an associate professor chemical engineering at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.  He is an Israeli Arab who comes from the city of Nazareth.  Haick recounts how he read about dogs who apparently were capable of sniffing cancer – detecting cancer in people where no such cancer had been detected before by conventional means.  Dogs, of course, have super-sensitive noses.  Still the fact that the presence of cancerous tumors led to a distinctive, though faint, odor, was surprising.  A segment of the CBS program 60 Minutes documented, and demonstrated, how dogs could sniff out bladder cancer, in 2009.

   Haick set to work (with associates Abassi and Nakhoul)  to see if he could develop a sensor “nose”, like that of a dog, capable of sniffing cancer and perhaps other illnesses.  And he succeeded.  He recently won an award for his project on “a nanosensor array for easy detection of volatile biomarkers at early stages of lung cancer and related genetic mutations”.  Haick has built a highly sensitive, inexpensive, portable and fast-response array of nanosensors for detecting molecules that indicate increased risk of lung cancer, or the presence of lung cancer. Of course, it is well known that advanced lung cancer is nearly always fatal. So Haick’s “nose” could save many lives, when it is proven and available.   

   I don’t know if Prof. Haick will win a Nobel for his breakthrough, or when his ‘cancer nose’ will be widely available.  I think the lesson for innovators here is clear.  Millions of people watched 60 Minutes in amazement, as doggies  Biddie and Tangle, Oak and Dill, Bee, and a couple of pre-med rookies, Briar and Daisy, did their thing.  Other scholars replicated the study with other dogs.  Haick, in contrast, sought to improve on the dog’s cancer-sniffing noses with nano-technology.  Pushing a finding higher and farther is what creative people seek.  Dogs’ noses are truly incredible things.  They have 100 times more receptors than human noses, and are hence probably 1,000 times more sensitive.  A tough act to follow – or duplicate?  Haick tried, and apparently succeeded.

    So if you are a smoker,  pat that stray dog you see on the street and perhaps give him a treat or a drink of water.   Even if you choose not to save his or her life, indirectly he may save yours.