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Britain’s National Health Service recently approved a trial for dogs capable of sniffing out prostate cancer.

It’s long been known that a dog’s remarkable sense of smell can detect minute odors known to be associated with many cancers that are understood to be linked to volatile organic compounds produced by malignant cells.

Dr. Claire Guest who co-founded charity Medical Detection Dogs in 2008 to train specialist dogs to detect human diseases says that the dogs’ ability to sense chemical changes has been known throughout history but overlooked by modern medicine: “What dogs are doing is actually revisiting a way in which diagnosis has been done centuries ago. It was understood then that different volatiles – or smelly compounds – could be involved with changes in our body and may in fact enable someone to make an accurate diagnosis. But this has been very much forgotten. What the dogs are doing is finding the odors from biochemical changes in our body and this is opening a new way of diagnosing diseases and conditions in the future.”

Medical Detection Dogs gained approval from Milton Keynes University Hospital for further trials, after initial testing showed trained dogs can detect prostate tumors in urine in 93% of cases. The charity says dogs undergo training for a period of about six months, after which they can reliably identify urine with traces of cancer cells in it.