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Great Leader. Researchers have invented an “electronic nose” that can pick up chemicals in the breath of cancer sufferers that point to the disease. They hope that one day the “inexpensive” device could be used in clinics across the world and, because it is cheaper and less invasive than current tests, it will lead to early diagnosis.
Lung cancer kills more than 1.3 million a year. In the UK alone 39,000 people are diagnosed annually. Half of all sufferers die within a year of diagnosis and 80 per cent within two years. Early detection dramatically reduces the death rate.
Dr Hossam Haick, a chemical engineer at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, has created an electronic “nose” that can diagnose cancer in just two or three minutes by analysing a patient’s breath. When a cancerous tumour develops in the body, its cells produce various chemicals that appear in the urine and blood.
These biomarkers cross from the blood into the lungs, where they are exhaled in minuscule amounts. Dr Haick’s device detects cancer by “sniffing out” those telltale molecules. The current version detects lung cancer but it is thought it could be adapted to pinpoint breast, and colon cancer. The finished device should be portable and inexpensive and provide a faster, easier, and more sensitive way to screen for tumours than X-rays or blood tests.
Such screening should help doctors detect cancer early, when it’s most treatable. Dr Haick hopes the nose, which uses tiny nano detectors, will eventually be as small as a mobile phone. “We hope that in the future it will be a routine screening for all cancers, thereby guaranteeing early treatment,” said Dr Haick, in an earlier statement.
His study findings, which successfully involved testing the device on 62 volunteers, two-thirds of which had early stage cancer, is published in Nature Nanotechnology. “Sniff tests” for cancer have received much publicity in recent years. Dogs can sniff out people with cancer, but their sensitivity is less than 50 per cent.
The Telegraph