Sniffer dogs: On the trail of COVID-19

Search dog, Drago lies down: His signal that he has sniffed out the coronavirus in the sample

On the trail of COVID-19

Pandemic control with sniffer dogs – “Trackdog” project

From explosives to the Asian long-horned beetle – at the Institute of Safety and Security Research (ISF) at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, University of Applied Sciences, trained search dogs sniff out a wide variety of threats. Professor Peter Kaul and his team are known for their years of research on sniffer dogs as “living sensors”. The idea of training dogs to detect the coronavirus was therefore suggested to the safety expert several times. The long-term goal was for the dogs to be able to distinguish between people suffering from COVID-19 and those with colds and, in the best case, even sniff out different variants of the virus.

“We want to find out whether there are specific odour components that indicate a COVID-19 infection,” Kaul explains the research project. The cell death triggered by the virus causes a metabolic change in the cells. This produces something called volatile organic substances that can be smelled. Kaul and his team want to use analytics to identify precisely those odour substances that are specific to the coronavirus. Overcoming obstacles to research

A lot needed to be done before carrying out the first tests with the sniffer dogs from the cooperation partner AWiAS. The supply of the sample material from the University Medical Center Mainz, which accompanies the project as another scientific partner, had to be approved by the Ethics Committee of Rhineland-Palatinate. In addition, the infective properties of the positive samples had to be removed in advance through thermal treatment to enable safe handling of the samples. The University Hospital Frankfurt was also involved in preliminary tests.

The first double-blind samples with sweat swabs from corona-positive persons indicate that the sniffer dogs recognise specific odour components. But can these components also be identified in other people? That’s what Kaul and his team want to find out. “We’re optimistic. The experiments thus far indicate that dogs can sniff out certain olfactory components. Once we’ve identified these precisely, synthetic training agents can be produced for the dogs to facilitate training for the coronavirus.” A major setback for the research project came with the flood in July 2021, which severely damaged the buildings at the Rheinbach campus and completely immobilised laboratory operations. The first results are expected in the course of 2022.