Liz Dyck has jumped a major hurdle in her path towards fighting cancer with the help of her beloved Labrador retrievers.
The Langdon resident has completed a 42-hour course in Chico, California, at the In Situ Foundation, and is now registered to teach dogs scent detection.
With her own dogs, Dana and Ecko, joining another three that she will train, she hopes to soon be able to conduct studies where the quintet will sniff out cancer from breath samples compiled by universities and hospitals.
“It was like going back to school,” said Dyck, who is helping to nurse Ecko back from knee surgery. “Basically, it was a lot of classroom study. It was about how to collaborate with the universities and hospitals. That’s where I’m at right now. You need to collaborate with them because you need them to write a paper.”
Dyck was inspired to look further into scent detection, specifically for cancer, when her mother died from the disease last year. She now feels like she’s found a purpose in her life.
“That triggered it,” Dyck said. “I told myself: Now we do it. I’m 55 and I know what I want to be when I grow up.’ I was thankful I could go through the course. It was expensive but worth every penny.”
It takes between 12-to-18 weeks to train each dog and Dyck is excited to get to work as she feels 2017 will be a busy year.
She’s set up a non-profit called Bio Detection Dogs Canada and is busy building a website while continuing to work as an energy consultant. Although she’s now certified, there will be refresher courses every year that may require more trips to California.
The In Situ Foundation has been scientifically training dogs for early cancer detection in humans for 12 years, and they are still rolling out certifications on a small scale. Dyck was one of eight students in this round of classes, and got to meet people from around the world all working towards saving lives with early cancer detection.
What Dyck likes about this type of testing is that it is much less invasive than doing a biopsy, and will be much more private. It is her dream to see samples taken as part of a regular checkup.
“One of the things is that these dogs, once trained, will know if a tumor is malignant or benign,” Dyck said. “No other machine can actually tell that by looking at it. They can find the tumour but they have to do a biopsy. That’s more invasive stuff. This is super cheap in relation to the other things.”
“I will be getting the samples in small vials and I will screen them. They will just be numbers. I will never know who those people are. It’s all about the privacy. It’s important that way. The hospital will be informed of this sample has been flagged, and that five out of five dogs says it is a malignant tumour. ”
“The goal is to do it as a public screening on a regular basis. If you go to your doctor for a regular physical, this screening will be part of it.”
The process will take many years to become standard practice, but Dyck isn’t worried about the hard work. She’s anxious for the process to get moving of course, but she understands that this is the early stages.
“Before I die, I want this to be part of a regular course,” Dyck said. “That’s the goal. In the medical industry, it takes so long for things to get going. We need thousands of clinical trials to get this to the next step.”
