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

描述（由申请人提供）：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释放到血液中并随尿液排出。Specific Technologies开创了一种新颖的，高灵敏度和高维化学传感器阵列，在某些方面模仿生物嗅觉感应，暴露于挥发性分子会产生复杂的传感器模式，甚至可以区分复杂的混合物。最近的研究表明，犬科动物在接受尿液样本的训练后，能够以较高的准确率检测早期癌症。我们提出的初步数据表明，当暴露于尿液顶空气体时，我们的voc敏感传感器能够以鉴别肺癌的模式做出反应。如果在更广泛的测试中得到证实，该检测将为早期肺癌提供非侵入性、快速（1小时）、低成本（10美元）的即时诊断，我们相信这将在广泛的临床环境中具有重要价值，最初可作为不确定肺结节患者的辅助诊断，最终可能允许在高风险人群中进行肺癌预筛查。这种检测活性肿瘤代谢的方法也可以实现对化疗疗效的无创和廉价监测。

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.