Imagine this. You blow into a small valve attached to a box and it can tell if you have lung cancer. No more X-rays or invasive surgery. Just your breath is the tool.
Sound impossible? A new biomarker-detecting breathalyzer may one day be able to detect more than your blood alcohol content. How about if you’re suffering from diabetes to lung cancer, too?
Charlie Osborne at smartplanet.com stated that CNet reported, the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer may eventually shut down all, or many, of the old ways of diagnosing certain diseases, and improve the diagnostic skills of medical professionals worldwide.
It all began in 2010, Osborne reports, when researchers at Stony Brook University in New York began testing the device to see if it could detect certain biomarkers that lead to the diagnosis of certain health problems, in this case, diabetes.
Using sensor nanotechnologies (think, smaller than a grain of salt), researchers analyzed whether gas – such as acetone in exhaled breath – could point to certain diseases.
The device works by an individual blowing into a small valve attached to a box approximately half the size of a normal shoebox — and weighing less than a pound. Once you blow into it, the lights on top of the box provide an instant read-out – green light, you’re ok; red light, you might need to see a doctor to check if something more serious is an issue, according to Miles O'Brien and Jon Baime at Science Nation.
Professor Perena Gouma and her team at the university developed the sensor chip which lies at the heart of the breathalyzer’s capabilities, according to Osborne. The device is coated with minuscule nanowires that can seek out minute amounts of chemical compounds contained within the breath.
“These nanowires enable the sensor to detect just a few molecules of the disease marker gas in a ’sea’ of billions of molecules of other compounds that the breath consists of,” Gouma told Elizabeth Armstrong Moore at cnet.com. “This is what nanotechnology is all about.”
A process called electrospinning — which involves shooting a liquid compound into an electrical field, solidifying the composition in to wires – is what creates the sensor. Individual conditions (and biomarkers) can be detected through nanowires using different configurations of atoms.
More work remains to be done. The device must prove successful in clinical trials, but if it does, the applications of this technology could even detect microbes and viruses — including E. coli and anthrax, Moore writes.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
