It is one of every patient’s worst nightmare and one of every doctor’s notorious foe: The Big C or Cancer. Every year millions of innocent and precious lives is claimed by this menacing illness. The sad part is, most of them could have actually forestalled the tragic ending if only it was detected earlier.
Researchers are now trying to curb the mortality rate of Cancer patients by improving on means and ways to detect cancer as early and efficient as possible. Today, a group of scientist has just announced that they have been succesful with their Cancer Diagnosing Breathe Sensor Device.
In a statement released today, researchers at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology announce that their experiment on a diagnostic breath-analysis tool has been fruitful. They had said that “though diagnostic breath-analysis tools have been around for several decades, this is the first time a material has been developed that’s sensitive enough to deliver on-the-spot results”.
According to experts, 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 long played on this fact to come up with a breath-sensing systems that could diagnose the disease, as an alternative to current costly diagnostic methods.
Carlos Martinez, one of the researchers in the team and an assistant professor for materials in engineering at Purdue University said:
“We are talking about creating an inexpensive, rapid way of collecting diagnostic information about a patient. It might say, ‘… you are metabolizing a specific compound indicative of this type of cancer,’ and then additional, more complex tests could be conducted to confirm the diagnosis.”
“People have been working in this area for about 30 years but have not been able to detect low enough concentrations in real time. We solved that problem with the materials we developed, and we are now focusing on how to be very specific, how to distinguish particular biomarkers.”
The team had shared that they have used nanoparticles to create a material sensitive enough to analyze a patient’s breath in real time and detect indicators of cancer and other diseases.
According to reports, The Purdue and NIST technologists basically produced a more effective sensor by using a flat surface — therefore increasing its surface area– with a material created using a coating of metal-oxide nanoparticles made for an extremely porous metal-oxide film. The team then used the material to detect chemical compounds that are a biomarker for certain illness. They were quickly able, they said, to pick up on biomarkers in the parts per billion to parts per million range–at least 100 times better than earlier breath-analysis tools.
This is definitely a welcoming news to the medical community. “The fact that we were able to do this in real time is a big step in the right direction,” Martinez said, though tools like this for real-world use are likely a decade away, if not longer, in part because precise manufacturing standards haven’t been developed for the new approach.
