Seven years have passed since the article quoted below predicted that sniffing devices would be available to clinicians in three to five years. I believe the prediction was premature. In the meantime, we should be making more and better use of dog noses to sniff out disease.
(p. D5) But not every physician’s nose is a precision instrument, and dogs, while adept at sniffing out cancer, get distracted. So researchers have been trying for decades to figure out how to build an inexpensive odor sensor for quick, reliable and noninvasive diagnoses.
. . .
“You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England.
Mr. Boyle, an electronics engineer, formed the company with two friends in 2004 to develop sensors to detect chemical weapons and explosives for customers, including the United States government. But when Mr. Boyle’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Kate Gross, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012, his focus shifted to medical sensors, with an emphasis on cancer detection.
Ms. Gross died at the end of 2014. That she might still be alive if her cancer had been detected earlier, Mr. Boyle said, continues to be a “big motivator.”
. . .
A similar diagnostic technology is being developed by an Israeli chemical engineer, Hossam Haick, who was also touched by cancer.
“My college roommate had leukemia, and it made me want to see whether a sensor could be used for treatment,” said Mr. Haick, a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. “But then I realized early diagnosis could be as important as treatment itself.”
. . .
In the United States, a team of researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania received an $815,000 grant in February [2017] from the Kleberg Foundation to advance work on a prototype odor sensor that detects ovarian cancer in samples of blood plasma.
. . .
“We are trying to make the device work the way we understand mammalian olfaction works,” said Charlie Johnson, director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading the fabrication effort. “DNA gives unique characteristics for this process.”
In addition to these groups, teams in Austria, Switzerland and Japan also are developing odor sensors to diagnose disease.
“I think the fact that you’re seeing so much activity both in commercial and academic settings shows that we’re getting a lot closer,” said Cristina Davis, a biomedical engineer and professor at the University of California, Davis, who also is helping to develop an odor sensor to diagnose disease.
“My estimate is it’s a three- to five-year time frame” before such tools are available to clinicians, she added.
For the full story see:
Kate Murphy. “The Race to Sniff Out Disease.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2017 [sic]): D5.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 1, 2017 [sic], and has the title “One Day, a Machine Will Smell Whether You’re Sick.”)