What if you could instantly diagnose diabetes, lung cancer or asthma just by blowing on a chip?

Scientists at the University of Florida in Gainesville have developed an infinitesimally tiny disposable sensor, costing just pennies, that might be able to do just that.

Fan Ren, a professor of materials science, engineering and computer engineering at the university, tells DOTmed News he and his team created the chip by joining sensing materials with a semiconductor transistor that ramps up the signal strength.

Ren's team includes Tanmay Lele, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, Jenshan Lin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and Wenhsing Wu, a lecturer in electrical and computer engineering.

According to Ren, the device is one thousand to one million times more sensitive than conventional sensors, and works in less than 10 seconds. This extreme sensitivity lets it detect trace biomarkers of disease in body fluids, such as urine, saliva and even the condensed moisture of an exhaled breath.

BREATH TESTS

In the lungs, millions of tiny blood vessels get exposed to circulating gases, which pick up compounds found in the blood and carry them in our breath, Ren explains. Theoretically it should be possible for doctors to test for the same substances in the breath that they look for in blood.

But, in practice, it's tough. The problem with getting an accurate diagnosis from breath tests, Ren says, is that very little moisture comes from a breath condensate -- only around 4 micro liters, or one-hundredth the volume of a single drop of water.

While doctors have developed systems for, say, gathering glucose concentrations from breath tests, they're slow and cumbersome. For detecting glucose, it involves a complicated apparatus where patients have to breathe into a tube for a long time in order to collect enough material to make a diagnosis, says Ren.

"They need to collect a lot of samples, around 20 minutes to get enough breath condensate," he says.

But his device's sensitivity means it only needs 100 pico liters of condensate, so it can be processed nearly instantly.

Once the breath is collected and the substance is found by the sensor, it would automatically trigger a voltage discharge that could be controlled to give a read-out reporting the concentration level of the substance.

It would not need a specialized technician to read the results, Ren says.

FINDING DISEASE

Ren's team is already investigating the device's use in detecting lung cancer. To do so, the researchers coat sensors in antibodies that react to antigens produced by lung cancers and which travel in the breath.

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