I am investing in dogs with brain interfaces that detect cancer by scent

I am going to invest in a project that trains dogs to detect cancer by smelling breath.

I know how that sounds. That is why I am telling you why, with the data in front of me, and also what has not yet been proven.

The company and the study

It is called Dognosis, it is from Bangalore and was founded by Akash Kulgod and Itamar Bitan. In April, it published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology the largest study conducted to date with cancer-detecting dogs: 1,502 people from six Indian hospitals. 283 had biopsy-confirmed cancer and 1,219 did not.

The procedure: you breathe for ten minutes into a cotton mask, it is sealed and sent to the laboratory. There, it is smelled by three dogs separately, and a statistical model combines their responses.

Result: it detected 90.8% of seven different types of cancer and correctly ruled out 91.3% of those who did not have it. In stage I, which is when the most lives are saved, it was 90.3% accurate.

The mechanism: cancer has a scent

A tumor cell burns glucose inefficiently and lives with high oxidative stress, which oxidizes the fats in its own membranes. This produces volatile organic compounds that enter the bloodstream, reach the lungs, and are released with every exhalation.

Nearly 1,500 have been cataloged, and each cancer leaves a distinct pattern. No electronic sensor reads that cocktail well at such low concentrations. The dog does: it has hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors and recognizes complete patterns, not loose molecules.

Why I am investing

The bottleneck for cancer is not treating it; it is finding it early. And the screenings that work are expensive, invasive, or only useful for one type of tumor.

Dognosis does not want to replace mammograms or colonoscopies. It wants to be the first filter: a cheap, non-invasive test that decides who needs expensive tests. The company talks about about 2 dollars per test.

The part that interests me most as an engineer is the next phase. Each dog wears a helmet with a brain-computer interface that records its brain activity, heart rate, and respiration while it sniffs. The idea is to translate the dog's nose into data, scale it to millions of samples, and, in the long term, digitize the sense of smell.

Important nuances

1. The 90.8% does not come from the brain interfaces. It comes from the dogs plus statistics. The interface is the future bet, and that is why it is a risky investment.

2. Prevalence changes everything. In the study, almost 1 in 5 participants had cancer. In the general population, it is around 1%. With 10,000 people, the test would find about 91 cancers and produce about 860 false alarms. Out of every 10 positives, 9 would be scares. Useful as triage, useless as a diagnosis.

3. It is a phase II study with already known cases and was funded by the company itself. Real screening is still missing, which they are preparing in several states in India and later in the US.

4. I have a financial interest in this working out. Keep that in mind when reading me. And this is not an investment recommendation: it is a private startup and the most likely outcome for any startup is that it will fail.

Practical application

This test is not available in Spain. What you do have are public screenings with decades of evidence that many people ignore: fecal occult blood test every two years between 50 and 69, mammograms every two years in the same age range, and cervical cancer screening.

Before any new test (dogs, blood, AI), ask one question: out of every 100 positives, how many are actually cancer?

Your 1% improvement for today. Compound interest that accumulates.

Check today which screenings you are due for based on your age. If you have an occult blood kit in a drawer, do it this week. If your parents are in that age bracket, ask them.

In the private Longevity Workshop WhatsApp group, we also talk about and sometimes offer these investment opportunities.

Remember that I am now selling only ONE access to the Longevity Workshop and Longevity Private WhatsApp Group per day with a discount.

The price is set by a Dutch auction.

It goes down throughout the day.

→ See the current price of the Longevity Workshop and Longevity Private WhatsApp Group