Na-Nose a Device to Detect Disease (Cancer)

 

When I was a kid I thought if you get cancer it means you're dead it is one of the deadliest diseases and nearly 10 million people die from cancer every year, but what if there was a way to catch cancer before it spreads in our body.  A Technion Prof. Hossam Haick has made a device that can find cancer using your breath. Hossam’s life changed when he found out his best friend had cancer and was very touched by seeing his suffering from the treatment of cancer, so he decided to dedicate his life to medicine and find a new way to treat cancer.

Today you could have cancer in your body and you don't even know it, because there are no symptoms so professor Hossam thought instead of trying to find cancer after it spreads, why not catch it before it spreads? He learned that diseases can change the smell of your breath in fact dogs can detect cancer and other diseases just by smelling a person's urine and breath sample, so professor Hossam built a device that works just like a dog's nose this is the Na-Nose device.  

How it Works

In the body when a cancer cell grows it releases tiny molecules that try to escape from the body, these molecules travel to the lungs where they mix with the air and the lungs release them, so if you have a cancer cell growing inside your body the air you release will have these cancer molecules and that's where Na-Nose’s comes in when you exhale into the na-Nose’s the device will study the breath using AI and nanotechnology. It will look for those tiny cancer molecules and if it catches them it will signal and alert and that's how this device can tell if you have cancer or not even before any of the symptoms show just based on your breath.

Professor stated that when we started our research on breath analysis have collected the breath from healthy and from diseased people, one of the healthy cases told us that he knows that he has no disease and that he has done a test before few months before and he was sure that he's healthy nevertheless when we have done the breath analyzer using our device we have discovered signs for cancer, a few months later on it was discovered that there is a tumor inside the lung before you had to go to a doctor to get tested for cancer and millions of people don't do that or can't afford to with the nose you can test for cancers Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s right from your home even if you live in a remote village in Ethiopia.

This is the grand vision of professor Hossam these systems are so cheap and affordable that can be utilized by every person whether poor or rich his device is still a prototype and it's in production and within three years he says we should be able to get this device in our hands we hope we can afford equal opportunity for their health management and treatment.