The breath of people with lung cancer is different from that of healthy people — it contains higher concentrations of alkanes and other volatile organic compounds.
Researchers have known this for years, and have tried to develop breath-sensing systems that could diagnose the disease, as an alternative to CT scans and other current diagnostic methods. The systems have tended to be costly, requiring complicated equipment and techniques to concentrate the compounds so they reach detectable levels.
Gang Peng of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and colleagues have now developed what they say is an inexpensive, portable sensor technology that can quickly distinguish between the breath of lung cancer patients and healthy people.
The sensor, described in Nature Nanotechnology, uses tiny particles of gold, five billionths of a meter in diameter, that are capped with organic compounds chosen for their ability to react with four of the volatile compounds found in higher concentrations in the breath of lung cancer patients. When the particles are deposited in a thin film between two electrodes, they act as an electrical resistor.
The researchers found that when an array of nine resistors was exposed to exhaled breath, the resistance changed as compounds in the breath reacted with the compounds on the gold particles. The patterns of the changes in the array differed depending whether the subjects had lung cancer or not.
The researchers are continuing to develop the system, and say that a similar approach may work for the diagnosis of other diseases as well.
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