19th February 2021 7:20 am 19th February 2021 12:07 pm Researchers have developed a device with greater sensitivity than a dog’s nose, aiming for more accurate disease detection in lab samples. Image: Alexander Stein, Pixabay The findings, which researchers said could someday lead to an automated odour-detection system small enough to be incorporated into a mobile phone, have been published in PLOS One. The paper is authored by Clare Guest of Medical Detection Dogs in the UK, research scientist Andreas Mershin of MIT, and 18 others from various universities and organisations including Johns Hopkins University and the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Studies have shown that trained dogs can detect diseases including various types of cancer, and potentially COVID-19. In some cases, involving prostate cancer for example, dogs had a 99 per cent success rate in detecting the disease by sniffing patients’ urine samples.