After initially fleshing out a plan to use dogs to sniff out COVID-19 patients, the trial has gone live in the UK, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.
In a statement issued over the weekend, the UK government said the research could be “used as a potential new non-invasive, early warning measure to detect coronavirus in the future.”
“Bio-detection dogs already detect specific cancers and we believe this innovation might provide speedy results as part of our wider testing strategy,” Minister for Innovation Lord Bethell said in a statement.
“Accuracy is essential so this trial will tell us whether ‘COVID dogs’ can reliably detect the virus and stop it spreading.”
The trial, done in conjunction with researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the charity Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University, will be backed by $607,000 of government funding.
Dr. Claire Guest, the co-founder and CEO of Medical Detection Dogs, said she was “delighted” the trial was starting and was optimistic the dogs could aid in screening people for the disease.
“We have already demonstrated our expertise in canine disease detection by successfully training dogs to detect diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s and malaria, and we apply that same science to train life-saving Medical Alert Assistance Dogs to detect odor changes in individuals caused by their health condition,” Guest added in the statement.
“We are sure our dogs will be able to find the odor of COVID-19 and we will then move into a second phase to test them in live situations, following which we hope to work with other agencies to train more dogs for deployment,” Guest explained. “We are incredibly proud that a dog’s nose could once again save many lives.”
In the UK, nearly 245,000 patients have been infected by the novel coronavirus, resulting in nearly 34,700 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Previously, Guest said she believed the dogs could screen up to 750 people per hour “really quickly.”
The dogs in the trial are a mixture of labrador and cocker spaniels, the Department of Health and Social Care added. The first phase of the trial will have NHS staff in London hospitals gather odor samples from people who are infected with the coronavirus and those who are not. The six dogs in the trial will undergo a rigorous training regimen to learn to identify the virus.
If successful, it could “revolutionize” how the virus is detected, James Logan, lead researcher for the work and Head of the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explained.
“Our previous work has shown that malaria has a distinctive odor, and with Medical Detection Dogs, we successfully trained dogs to accurately detect malaria,” Logan said. “This, combined with the knowledge that respiratory disease can change body odor, makes us hopeful that the dogs can also detect COVID-19.”
Earlier this month, dogs in the US were also being trained to sniff out the coronavirus.
As of Monday morning, more than 4.73 million coronavirus cases have been diagnosed worldwide, more than 1.48 million of which are in the US, the most impacted country on the planet.