On a two-acre farm just outside Bengaluru, a very different kind of workforce clocks in for its shift. Billy, Jessie, and Banu, along with a growing team of beagles, Labradors, and Dutch shepherds, spend their days walking into a lab packed with breath samples, using nothing but their noses to hunt for early signs of cancer.
The startup behind this unusual setup is Dognosis, a two-year-old Bengaluru company betting that one of biology’s oldest tools, the canine sense of smell, could reshape how India screens for cancer.
From Sniffing Explosives to Sniffing Tumours
Dogs have long been trained to detect drugs, explosives, and even certain diseases, including COVID-19 in earlier research elsewhere in the world. Dognosis is taking that same biological talent and pointing it squarely at cancer.
The process itself is refreshingly simple from a patient’s point of view. A person breathes into a mask, the sample gets couriered to the Dognosis facility, and trained dogs sniff it while sensors and AI quietly do the real analytical heavy lifting, tracking movement, respiration, and subtle behavioural cues that get converted into structured data.
The underlying science rests on volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, chemical traces the human body produces that appear to shift when cancer develops. Dogs, it turns out, can pick up on these changes long before conventional diagnostic equipment can.
Early Results Are Turning Heads
Dognosis says its Phase 2 trials, run over two years across nearly 1,500 participants, delivered an accuracy rate of around 90%. Oncologist Dr. Swaratika Majumdar, who has worked with the project for the past year, called it “an early, easy and inexpensive way of detecting cancers,” adding that the reported 90% sensitivity and specificity means the dogs correctly flag cancer roughly nine times out of ten when it’s actually present.
Suba, Head of Research and Development at Dognosis, said standardisation is what makes the AI layer genuinely useful. “Every sample presented here is presented in exactly the same way so that when the dog responds to it, we can record the outputs precisely,” she explained, describing how subjective canine behaviour gets translated into objective, scientific data.
A Bigger Trial, and a Bigger Ambition
Dognosis isn’t stopping at early-stage results. In April, the company kicked off its Phase 3 trial across ten hospitals in India, with plans to enrol close to 10,000 participants over the next twelve months. The trial specifically targets two groups: asymptomatic people at higher risk of developing cancer, and survivors who may be at risk of recurrence. Anyone flagged by the dogs would move on to conventional follow-up, including imaging and biopsy.
Notably, the company doesn’t need Indian regulatory approval to operate, since the test is positioned as a prescreening tool rather than a diagnostic device, and only diagnostic tools fall under formal regulation in India.
If the trial results hold up, Dognosis plans to launch commercially in Bengaluru next year, before expanding to other Indian cities through partnerships with diagnostic chains and healthcare providers. Longer term, the company is eyeing an even bigger canine workforce, aiming to double its dog team to 30 and process up to a million tests a year, with an eventual push into the US market as well.
Why This Matters for India
The timing lines up with a genuine gap in India’s healthcare system. The country recorded roughly 1.5 million new cancer cases and over 900,000 deaths in 2024, yet screening rates remain painfully low, with cervical cancer screening at just about 1.9% and breast or oral cancer screening under 1%.
A low-cost, non-invasive breath test that doesn’t require specialist infrastructure could reach exactly the population the formal healthcare system often misses. It’s also a striking reminder of how much untapped potential lies in the human-animal bond, where dogs aren’t just companions, but increasingly, collaborators in solving some of our toughest health challenges.
News Credits: The VOSD Daily
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