Golden Retriever becomes a cancer hero

As Bethany wrote on earlier, dogs have been used by many people to seek out cancer. While shunned by many in the medical community, the use of canines to "find" cancer is well-documented. But, it can go beyond that.

Alex, a Golden Retriever, has become the first dog to have tissue samples submitted to a new "canine cancer repository" that sits right next to the U.S. National Cancer Institute's own library of human cancer samples. Why is that, you may ask?

Cancer researchers have determined that the way cancer malignancies occur in dogs may indeed hold vital clues to human cancer. With dogs and humans both being mammals, this makes sense, and the mapping of the canine and human genomes have made more detailed comparisons possible recently. Perhaps dogs really are "man's best friend."