The Rapid and Inexpensive Detection of Lung Cancer from Urine Headspace Analysis

描述(申请人提供)：肺癌是全球癌症死亡的主要原因。死亡率高的部分原因是缺乏早期发现和治疗的良好检测。我们的技术通过分析肿瘤代谢产生的挥发性有机分子的特定指纹来诊断癌症的存在，这些分子从肿瘤组织中排出到血液中，并从尿液中排泄出来。特定技术公司率先推出了一种新颖、高灵敏度和高维的化学传感器阵列，该阵列在某些方面模拟了生物嗅觉，因为暴露在挥发性分子中会产生复杂的传感器图案，即使是复杂的混合物也可以被区分开来。最近的研究表明，提供尿液样本的狗可以被训练成高精度地检测早期癌症，我们提供了初步数据，表明我们的VOC敏感传感器在暴露于尿液顶空气体时，对肺癌的识别模式做出了反应。如果在更广泛的测试中得到证实，这种检测将为早期肺癌提供非侵入性、快速(1小时)、低成本(订购10美元)的诊断，我们相信这将在广泛的临床环境中具有重要价值，最初作为不确定肺结节患者的辅助诊断，或许最终允许高危个体进行肺癌预筛查。这种对存在活跃的肿瘤代谢的分析也可以实现对化疗效果的非侵入性和廉价的监测。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. The high mortality is in part due to the lack of good tests for early detection and treatment. Our technology diagnoses the presence of cancer via analysis of the specific fingerprint of volatile organic molecules produced by tumor metabolism, out- gassed from tumor tissue to blood and excreted in urine. Specific Technologies has pioneered a novel, highly sensitive and high dimensional chemical sensor array which in some respects mimics biological olfactory sensing, in that exposure to volatile molecules produces a complex sensor pattern allows even complex mixtures to be discriminated. Motivated by recent studies demonstrating that canines presented with urine samples can be trained to detect early stage cancer with high accuracy, we present preliminary data suggesting that our VOC-sensitive sensor responds with patterns discriminative of lung cancer when exposed urine headspace gas. If confirmed in more extensive testing, this assay would offer a non-invasive, rapid (1 hour), low-cost (order $10), point-of-care diagnostic for early stage lung cancer which we believe will be of significant value across a wide range of clinical settings, initially serving as an adjunct diagnostic for patients wth indeterminate pulmonary nodules, perhaps eventually allowing for lung cancer pre-screening in high-risk individuals. This assay of the presence of active tumor metabolism may also enable non-invasive and inexpensive monitoring of the efficacy of chemotherapy.