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| Photo credit: Owlstone Medical |
Led by Rebecca Fitzgerald, a researcher at the MRC Cancer Center at Cambridge University designed the study that aims to make a simple breath test that can identify patients with an early cancer.
“The PAN trial is seeing if you can use a breath test device that detects volatile molecules from the breath to identify patients that might have an early cancer that they don’t know about,” says Fitzgerald in a news post on Cancer Research UK’s blog.
The trial, running in collaboration with Owlstone Medical at Addenbrook’s Hospital in Cambridge will test the Breath Biopsy® that picks up distinctive molecules released by cells as they make and process energy. It is the first trial to look at this technology for detecting a range of cancers.
In the trial the researchers will collect and analyze the breath of 1,500 people to establish patterns, or 'signatures' in the breath samples from people who have no cancer, or who are suspected of having esophageal, stomach, prostate, kidney, bladder, liver or pancreatic cancer. The samples will then be analyzed and the differences between healthy patients and patients with cancer will be used to refine the technology.
Depending on how this early trial goes, the researchers hope the technology can eventually become so sensitive that it could become a simple, low-cost screening tool for a range of cancers before symptoms develop. To reach that goal a number of large clinical trials are planned.
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