MIT, Harvard Students Look To Bring Lung Cancer Breathalyzer Test To Market

When MIT student and Ph.D. candidate Joseph Azzarelli learned that dogs could be trained to smell cancer, he had an idea: what if a simple breathalyzer test could diagnose a patient with lung cancer?

The idea is slowly becoming a reality, after Azzarelli won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last week. The funding, in addition to the over $13,000 the company won through earlier stages of the MIT competition, will help startup conduct feasibility studies with patients this summer.

“Our goal is to first and foremost ensure efficacy and safety while bringing this product to market as soon as possible,” said Azzarelli in a statement, adding that the technology has already elicited interest from commercial partners.

The device, which is still patent-pending, is called an “L-CARD.” Azzarelli, along with three Harvard Medical School students and the Timothy Swager lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used their expertise in chemistry to identify the unique gasses that lung cancer patients give off.

The non-invasive screening test can identify those gases and be read wirelessly by a smartphone, providing diagnostic information in seconds. The device can also be produced for less than a dollar, and shipped anywhere inside of a simple envelope.

With lung cancer being the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, and with nine million Americans recommended for lung cancer screening last year alone, the device could have a tremendous impact on the cost and speed of lung cancer screenings. Currently, patients suspected of lung cancer have to undergo CT scans, which are expensive and accurate for mainly larger sized cancers.

The company, which currently goes by the name Astraus Technologies but will soon be rebranding, took the grand prize over seven other inventions, including a completely automated restaurant, a traffic forecasting tool, and a service that connects artists with places looking for art.

Source: Boston Business Journal, Jessica Bartlett
Photo: The L-CARD device is able to diagnose lung cancer based on patients’ breath. (Courtesy of Melanie Gonick)