FIVE life-saving hounds have begun vital training to learn how to detect skin cancer through their keen sense of smell.

Saunderton-based charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People has been working with health professionals from the Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust and has already found evidence that dogs can be trained to sniff out bladder cancer.

The project found evidence that dogs could detect the bladder cancer from distinctive smells in sufferers' urine.

Now the dogs will be used to try to detect skin cancer, including two previously used on the bladder cancer project.

Trainer Claire Guest said: "During the bladder cancer research the dogs were trained to detect cancer in a small sample of urine. With skin cancer, the dogs will be asked to detect the cancer on a patch of skin."

The animals will need at least six months to get up to speed.

The research is being funded through an Erasmus Wilson grant for dermatological research from Amersham Hospital.

Findings are expected to take many months to compile.

Ms Guest said: "Our original research was done on a shoestring and we only had a grant from one person which just covered costs. We had to do all the training in our spare time for one-and-a-half years."

"Now we have proved that dogs can detect cancer we needed lots of support, and there is great interest."

The theory that dogs could detect cancer started as a scattering of stories across the world.

People claimed they had been saved from undetected life-threatening cancers bec- ause their dog was attracted to a cancerous area.

Rather than having dogs employed by hospitals in the future, Ms Guest envisages their research being used to help identify the subtle differences in the many forms of cancer.

She said: "I don't think we will see dogs in hospital wards sniffing patients.

"I think the dogs will form a part of the diagnostic process. There is an awful lot to do in the future. We will probably know a lot more in a few years."