This Nanotech Breathalyzer Lets Doctors ‘Smell’ Lung Cancer

If you have lung cancer, your breath is a little bit different from everyone else. The cancer cells in the body release particular compounds that waft up from the lungs and out into the air when you exhale. Researchers have figured out a way to use the unique scent to create basically a breathalyzer to diagnose cancer.

Analyzing exhaled breath would be a noninvasive method of diagnosing lung cancer, something scientists have been chasing for years. Now nanotechnology is fast-tracking the development of a cancer-detecting breath test.

Mimicking dogs' ability to “smell" cancer, the device, dubbed Na-Nose (nano artificial nose), can detect those tiny particles when breath is exhaled, in the hopes of giving doctors the ability to sniff out cancer, too.

Patients blow up a balloon with air and then hand it over to the researchers, who run the captured breath through extremely sensitive nanotech sensors that detect specific patterns of compounds like benzene, octane, pentane, and isoprene that can be produced by malignant tumors.

“The data is encouraging because it shows we can potentially distinguish between cancer patients and healthy patients,” said Fred Hirsch, an oncologist at the University of Colorado who's presenting his work with Israeli collaborators at this week’s meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “You can also differentiate between early stage and advanced stage patients.”

So far, hundreds of people have participated in preliminary clinical tests with the device. In one of the most recent studies, published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the breathalyzer device demonstrated 88 percent accuracy in distinguishing between cancerous and noncancerous tumors.

Of 72 patients who had suspicious masses in their lungs, it identified 53 of them as malignant. The study also found the device was more than 85 percent accurate in identifying different types of lung cancers, such as adenocarcinoma and squamous-cell carcinoma, and recognizing the stage to which the cancer had progressed.

Lung cancer is the most fatal form of cancer, and often diagnosed too late to treat. Currently, doctors screen for lung cancer with a CT scan, which help catch glimpses of nodules, or masses, within patients' chests. In most cases, surgeons then need to go in, cut out a piece of the tumor, and run various tests to see whether it's benign or malignant.

According to Hirsch, 90 percent of the nodules imaged in the lungs of patients are benign, but oncologists can't be sure until they've conducted an invasive surgical procedure on the patient.

Na-Nose, created by Hossam Haick at Technion University in Israel, is meant to help avoid those kind of expensive and aggressive operations. If an imaging test reveals an abnormal nodule, all the patient would have to do is blow up a balloon and doctors analyze the air inside it.

Na-Nose isn’t the first device of its kind. Researchers at the University of Louisville and the Georgia Institute of Technology are also working to develop gadgets that can detect lung cancer.

But thanks to its unique nanoparticle sensors, Na-Nose is reportedly 1,000 times more sensitive than any current state-of-the-art breath tests out there. The device's sensors are thousands of times smaller than the width of a single human hair.

Hirsch said that unlike similar tests, Na-Nose doesn’t rely on mass spectrometry, which is more expensive, conducts slower diagnostics, and is not nearly as sensitive. Because its sensors are so compact, Haick was recently able to upgrade the device into a small, portable USB-powered device that patients can blow into and plug into a computer for rapid results.

If Na-Nose continues to show positive results in further studies, research team says it could be on the market in the next few years.