‘Robotic nose’ more sensitive to smell than cancer-detecting dogs developed by scientists

Researchers are closer than ever to an artificial system that can detect disease with even greater sensitivity than canines, writes Tom Batchelor

A dog’s nose could hold the key to detecting cancers (PA)

From drug searches to disease detection, the powerful sense of smell that dogs enjoy is used by humans to solve everyday problems.

Now, researchers say they are closer than ever to creating an artificial “robotic dog nose” with even greater sensitivity than a canine, which could sniff out cancer and Covid-19.

Scientists from the Massachusettes Instutute of Technology (MIT) and several other universities and organisations said they had devised a system that can detect the chemical and microbial content of an air sample, enabling them to identify different diseases.