Clinical Review
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Cancers exude odors that dogs can sniff with high accuracy, but dogs may get distracted in a clinical setting. Thus, researchers at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, turned to nematodes. In the Nematode Scent Detection Test (NSDT), the researchers tested the cancer-sensing ability of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) on 242 urine samples: 218 controls and 24 samples from patients with cancer.
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C. elegans performed remarkably well, with 95.8% sensitivity and 95% specificity. The positive predictive value was 67.6%; efficiency was 95%. Strikingly, the nematode was able to diagnose various cancer types tested at stage 0 or 1.
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The researchers tout the NSDT’s “outstanding” characteristics: high accuracy, low cost, painlessness, convenience, and speed. However, despite its nose for cancer, C. elegans can’t identify the organs harboring the cancer cells, the researchers say. Therefore, they suggest the test might best be combined with existing and new methods of diagnosis, such as metabolomic analyses.
Source
Hirotsu T, Sonoda H, Uozumi T, et al. PLoS ONE. 10(3):e0118699.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118699.
