Urine odour test for bladder cancer

11 July 2013

It has been mooted over the last few years that dogs can be trained to recognise the scent of cancer, but now, UK scientists have created a device that can 'smell' bladder cancer in urine samples.

Around 10,000 people are diagnosed with bladder cancer in the UK each year. As with many cancers, bladder cancer is more treatable if caught at an early stage. Now, researchers have designed a device which uses a sensor to detect gaseous chemicals that are given off if cancer cells are present.

To test their device, the researchers - including Professor Chris Probert from Liverpool University and Professor Norman Ratcliffe from the University of the West of England - used 98 samples of urine - 24 from men known to have bladder cancer and 74 from men, who suffered from bladder-related problems but did not have cancer.
Early trials indicated that the tests gives accurate results more than nine times in ten, the device's inventors told PLoS One journal.

While confident that the device can read cancer smells, however, both the researchers and cancer charities have acknowledged that more tests are required.
'It would be great to be able to detect the 'smell' of cancer in a robust and practical way but, promising though this work is, we're not there yet,' said Dr Sarah Hazell, senior science communication officer at Cancer Research UK. 'This latest method is still at an early stage of development, and needs to be tried out on a much larger set of samples, including samples from both women and men.

'The researchers say that the test would be around 96 per cent accurate in practice and their findings are only based on a relatively small number of samples, taken only from men. But it is another promising step towards detecting bladder cancer from urine samples, something that would ultimately provide a less invasive means of diagnosing the disease.'