Dognosis Origin Story
"As man lifts his eyes to the stars and meets the other inhabitants of this planet, his horizons become widened, his science deeper, his philosophy more in tune with the universe as it exists.”
John Lilly, Communication between Man and Dolphin
Akash draws his commitment to improving healthcare back to his grandfather Yallapa Kulgod, who started one of the first hospitals in the Taluka of Ramdurg in Belagavi District, North Karnataka. Growing up in a family of doctors in the 99th most populous city in India, Akash saw first-hand how impactful the practice of medicine can be, after all, what is more radical than the transformation of sickness to health? Yet, he saw how doctors were inherently constrained by the technology they had access to, and the limited time in a day, no matter how hard his grandfather, parents, uncles and aunts worked, 24 hours was not sufficient to attend to the immense sickness in a country of 1.4B people. Thus began his search for deep leverage points - places in a complex system where interventions can be difficult but have great potential to bring about transformative change.
Itamar saw up-front how dogs are capable of stupendous feats of cognition that cannot be replicated or matched by humans, even with the best technology of the 21st century. During his time as a soldier and commander of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Special Ops K9 Unit - the legendary Oketz - Itamar worked alongside some of the most elite dogs on the planet, performing explosive detection and other complex special operations that involved extraordinary challenges with life-and-death stakes. While he held immense gratitude for the opportunity to work with dogs at the highest level, Itamar did not expect to continue to work with dogs after the completion of his service, harbouring an impulse towards doing something that held greater potential for scalable impact. Yet as fate would have it, he ended up finding a path that remained entwined with canines.
Akash was fortunate to have the opportunity to study at the The University of California, Berkeley. There, he ended up taking 28 classes across 14 departments, performing research in 5 different research labs, and being involved with multiple student organizations. The common thread uniting his explorations was a fascination for the ability for cutting-edge science and technology to shine a light into the complexities of the mind, leading him to major in Cognitive Science, with a focus on Computational Neuroscience. This formed a rich intellectual substrate that he carried back with him on a gap semester in Belagavi during the second wave of the Covid pandemic.
As he observed his father managing a Covid hospital, with all the terrible trade-offs and decisions that this entailed, Akash, along with people all around the world, woke up to the fact that dogs could detect Covid-19, even in asymptomatic people, with extraordinarily high accuracies, often surpassing the gold-standard of RT-PCR. And yet, despite their performance, and the many advantages that the form factor and user interface of canine olfaction offers, dogs were not being deployed en-mass to work alongside humans to fight the viral scourge. Akash could not help but get obsessed with the question of why this was the case - where were the covid-sniffing dogs in Belagavi? The quest to find an answer to this question soon came to have a name.
Itamar was one of the 60 odd groups around the world participating in this landmark moment in the field of biomedical detection dogs - the first time humans and dogs worked together across continents to detect and monitor disease in real-world settings. As the first employee of the startup Prognose, he was initially recruited to aid the Indian Army to train dogs to stop the spread of Covid amongst soldiers at barracks in the North. But soon, he began to work on a different set of diseases that had plagued humanity for far longer than the new SARS virus. Itamar began training dogs to detect the emperor of all maladies - cancer, specifically breast cancer, the most common cancer in the world - as well as Parkinson’s - two diseases that continue to lack an effective early detection system leading to immense suffering worldwide.
Despite Itamar being well-aware of the incredible olfactory feats of dogs, he found it hard to not be skeptical of disease-sniffing dogs, sounding as it often is perceived to be, as straight out of some alternative woo pseudoscience. Yet, this skepticism began to quickly melt away as he saw the 5 Labradors on the team consistently indicating on masks that had been worn by women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
As it turns out, the documented history of dogs being able to detect cancer dates back as far as 1989, to a letter written in the Lancet by two London doctors. Dogs have been showed to be capable, in randomized double-blind peer-reviewed studies, to sniff out cancer with precision, sometimes even before symptoms are clinically or radiologically apparent. The reasons for their ability to remain unharnessed is largely a human one, involving solving engineering, operational, and regulatory challenges, and not the canine ability to detect disease.
6 months after graduating from UC Berkeley, and fuelled by an Emergent Ventures India grant, Akash set off to Israel for a visiting researcher stint at the Tech4Animals lab at the University of Haifa. Around the same time, Itamar was beginning to disengage from Prognose and make plans to travel in India. He had succeeded in validating the ability for the lab of labradors to sniff out breast cancer and Parkinson’s in two clinical trials, but had grown disillusioned with the positioning and business development (or lack there-of). Given the hyper-connected networks of Israel, and the nicheness of the field, it was inevitable for the two to connect in April 2023, though funnily enough, they switched countries before they first spoke to each other, as Itamar had already arrived in India.
Over a series of Zoom conversations, often including Akash’s father Dr Shashikant Kulgod, the concrete plans to startup up dognosis begin to take shape. India seemed like the obvious place to setup kennels, given the vast population, strong medical infrastructure, high talent density, low costs, and a pre-existing network. Boosted by a second Emergent Ventures India grant, this time as a team, Dognosis truly set their paws on the ground in August 2023.
The rest, as they say, is the future.
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Here is to the future!