International team develops breath test for lung cancer

The breathalyser test, embedded with a so-called NaNose nanotech chip to detect cancer tumours, was developed by Prof Nir Peled of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Prof Hossam Haick of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and Prof Fred Hirsch of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.

Their study, presented at a recent American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago, was conducted on 358 patients who were either diagnosed with or at risk for lung cancer.

‘Lung cancer is a devastating disease, responsible for almost 2,000 deaths in Israel annually - a third of all cancer-related deaths,’ Dr Peled said in a statement. ‘Lung cancer diagnoses require invasive procedures such as bronchoscopies, computer-guided biopsies, or surgery. Our new device combines several novel technologies with a new concept - using exhaled breath as a medium of diagnosing cancer. Our NaNose was able to detect lung cancer with 90 per cent accuracy even when the lung nodule was tiny and hard to sample. It was even able to discriminate between subtypes of cancer, which was unexpected.’