Who knew that skin cancer has a smell? An “odor profile” for skin cancer has been identified by researchers, giving them hope to develop an easy, noninvasive diagnostic test.
Researchers found that those with skin cancer have a differend odor profile from those with healthy skin, and scientists think that this difference could be used to detect cancer in a noninvasive way. With the current method of detection being biopsy, this noninvasive method would be much more welcomed. The odor profile findings were presented at the American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition in Philadelphia, and while the work of this particular study is preliminary, other research teams have looked at smell to detect skin cancer in the past. In these other studies, dogs have been trained to detect skin cancer by smell.
The researchers hope to have a diagnostic tool developed within a few years.
