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Breathalyzer That Detects Lung Cancer Early From a Single Breath Wins $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (mit.edu)
Lung cancer "breathalyzer," developed by a team of MIT and Harvard University students, has won $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The breathalyzer connects to a smartphone and is able to detect lung cancer early from a single breath, reports MIT News. From the report: Astraeus Technologies has developed a postage-stamp-sized device, called the L CARD, that detects certain gases indicative of lung cancer. When someone blows onto the device, a connected mobile app turns a smartphone screen red if those gases are present and green if they aren't. "The L CARD reacts and sends instantaneous information to the physician that further attention is required," Joseph Azzarelli, an MIT PhD student in chemistry said while a ripple of excitement spread through the crowd. Lung cancer is the deadliest type of cancer in the United States, causing more deaths than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined, according to the World Health Organization.
"The breathalyzer connects to a smartphone and is able to lung cancer early from a single breath"
I wonder if it can detect cancer with other, err, bodily gas flows...
Can you convince me that this isn't another scam like Theranos?
it will cost $10,000.00 to breathe into it. They do that, you know. And insurance will not cover it. They do that, you know.
> When someone blows onto the device, a connected mobile app turns a smartphone screen red if those gases are present and green if they aren't.
This miracle of science not available to color blind people. 8.5% of the population can just die already.
For the same reason Alcohol is. Some people just want to destroy their body and that is their right. I think marijuana should be legal for the same reason. Let natural selection do its work.
Yes. It's called freedom. Freedom also allows you to do what other people consider to be stupid or immoral. Like, oh, for instance:
drink
eat pork
eat beef
eat any animal
eat anything produced by an animal
have sex before marriage
have sex with someone of the same gender
marry someone outside of your religion
renounce your religion
have an abortion
take contraceptives
and many other things
If you have the right to abort a fetus you have the right to decide whether or not to consume tobacco, wear seat belts and every other aspect that ownership of ones body implies.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
and any other doc-in-a-box.
By your logic, shouldn't the fetus have a right to not have its body destroyed without its consent, like what happens in an abortion?
Because if you outlaw them then only criminals will have cigarettes?
Also, are you aware that smoking is not the only cause of lung cancer?
People who don't smoke (or get exposed to second hand smoke) get lung cancer too. Personally I think only idiots, rednecks, or old people smoke. It was different in the past. Criminalizing it would create a bunch of other problems that would be worse.
As long as the smoke doesn't affect anyone else. In most cases, it does.
And this, in a nutshell, spells out the argument between pro-choice and pro-life. At what point does the fetus have a right to life?
Some say conception. Some say birth. Some say some point in between that. Roe v Wade said 3 months.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Officer: You just blew twice the legal limit, your life is probably ruined now. oh, and btw.. you also have lung cancer.
Because banning addictive substances works 100% of the time with 0 adverse effects.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Some say 21 yeas.
...discussed at length here:
http://www.nature.com/articles...
You can buy a hell of a lot of dogs[1] for that amount of money!
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_dog_cancer.html/
One of the problems with such devices is that they don't report the percentage of false positives. This is a much bigger problem than false negatives, since there are more people who are negative (don't have lung cancer) than positive (have lung cancer). It's generally considered very bad to tell someone that they have cancer and then later say "Sorry, but we made a mistake." Though that's good news for them, they get upset that you told them the false bad news first. However, early diagnosis of lung cancer is an important area and if they made progress toward that then I applaud them.
Sounds like the thing just gives a binary yes/no reading. So why bother with the NFC and phone? Why not just have a red/green LED on the device itself?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
If I understand correctly what I'm reading about the biomarker gasses, it's not just the absence or presence of a gas or gasses, but the quantities, and the profile of those quantities in normal vs. diseased lungs. So, they're hooking it up to a pattern classifier. In the prototype stage you need a computer with a fair amount of power --- fortunately these days a smart phone will do. Down the road I imagine they could hook it up to a FPGA or six and eventually engineer it down to one chip, but that's a lot more engineering and likely years down the road.
Finding God in a Dog
Actually... since the tech behind it is based on these sensors and since dogs can already be trained to detect bacteria and prostate cancer by smell, while bladder cancer can be detected by smell as well...
The answer is probably yes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Cigarette smoke is not the only cause of lung cancer.
Now if the police really want to save lives (and not just revenue raise) they will incorporate this into random breath tests (RBT's)
My doc is starting to bug me about getting a colonoscopy. My wife did that a few years ago. The enemas/spending the night on the toilet is bad enough, but the thought of some dude (and a nurse, and some random tech, the secretary who needs a signature, the electrician adding an outlet, the Culligan guy replacing the water tank, and the gay guy with his phone out that just happens to be there cuz reasons) getting me doggy style while they run a camera from asshole to nostrils is just something I don't wanna do.
That said, my dad got polyps in his intestines all the time. Those ass cameras saved his life more than once. Somehow the thought of the guy who founded 3 churches and was asst pastor at one, on his hands and knees, with whatever tech they had in the 70s-90s, doesn't give me mental images I want to print on a 3D printer.
Lemme buy a $40 Guitar Hero kinda thing with some hardware and an app, tell me what to do, and mail it in. Long as you don't have forums named "Wow! Look at how bad that enema worked" and "Dang, that is the biggest ass cancer I've ever seen".
Ban alcohol, non-marital sex and undesirable thoughts at the same time! That has the same excellent justification as your demand.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Because banning addictive substances works 100% of the time with 0 adverse effects.*
* (Actual real-world observations may differ.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's the cause of a good 80%.
What about having sex with beef? Or aborting an animal? Or having sex with cigarettes before marriage?
Eat any animal is not a right in the US.
Go ahead and put up a YouTube video of you eating a bald eagle. I dare you.
Cigarettes are not the only cause of lung cancer. Lung cancer existed before cigarettes, and will exist even if we ban them. Offhand I can think of a half dozen celebrities and people I know who never smoked but died of lung cancer.
Anything that can damage your DNA can cause cancer - radiation, various kinds of chemicals, viruses, or just errors in replication. All these things can cause cancer in the lungs. While it's true tobacco drastically increases your odds of lung cancer, you still have about a 14/1000 chance of developing lung cancer even if you've never smoked a cigarette and aren't exposed to statistically significant amounts of secondhand smoke, i.e. you don't live with a smoker or tend bar at a smoke-filled pub.
So yes, you need early detection.
I'm a scientist and have worked in the sensor field for a long time. I have had students I've trained attempt this (commercial breath detection of cancer) with promising initial results. It's pretty easy to do the demo these guys are doing. It's very hard to do this with real people. The gap between cool academic demo and manufactured product is huge. The gap between product and FDA cleared diagnostic is even larger.
All 21 yeas? But I just got these yeas today, can I keep them a bit?
Also ban salt, and anything with sugar, and anything that isn't a pair of safety scissors, and driving, and skydiving, and all contact sports, and television, and sitting for longer than 15 minutes at a time....
I have a better idea, how about you have a nice big helping of go fuck yourself. Nobody should be dictating what an adult is allowed to willingly put in his or her body.
Second hand smoke is only really an issue if you're repeatedly subjected to it in confined spaces over a period of years. You're not suddenly going to get dick cancer because you stood beside someone having a cigarette at a bus stop. You inhale more carcinogens from passing cars.
The problem with idiots like you is you overstate the dangers of anything you don't like simply because you don't like it - not because it's particularly threatening. That makes you a useless pile of shit that is part of the bigger problem. The one that is slowly eroding all our liberties one at a time. Failed abortions like you won't be happy until we're so safe we're not allowed to do anything at all.
MIT isn't the only one working on this;
https://browncancercenter.louisville.edu/news-and-events/archive/drs.-bousamra-and-fu-develop-new-breath-test-for-lung-cancer
And now we just need a toilet that can detect colon, stomach and prostate cancer and we're good to go.
Nobody should be dictating what an adult is allowed to willingly put in his or her body.
When said willful self-damage causes increased rates of death and illness, which has to be treated by tax-funded services, it is only right for the tax payers to have some say in the matter.
I'm not saying an outright ban is the solution, because it absolutely isn't, but the taxes on self-damage products such as tobacco and alcohol should match or slightly exceed the increased burden placed on public services as a consequence of their use. That plus smoking bans inside workplaces and other places like public buildings, plus information campaigns will not work as an outright ban, but it will help. Enforced plain packaging like in Australia is another good idea, I just wish it could be applied to all products and marketing in general.
And before the smokers get to whine about how "oppressed" they are, they can start by picking up every single goddamn cigarette butt they just throw wherever, out of car windows and on the streets.
Eat the rich.
The Affordable Care Act makes it illegal to use ACA-compliant policy benefits to pay for early cancer screening in non-at-risk individuals. So, you can get this test, but you're going to pay out of pocket for it at full price.
That is, if they can ever get FDA approval. I'm sure the cancer drug makers will prevent that happening somehow, probably by buying this thing and making it disappear.
Theranos needs to start over by hiring these students.
The moment that fetus decides to stop being a parasite on someone else it can have its right to stay alive.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Wouldn't it be earilier if they just detected the smoke instead?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
There's a difference between allowing them to destroy themselves, and selling the means to do so at every gas station and grocery in the country.
What? You thought it really cost $10.00 to manufacture a pack of cigarettes? $20.00 to distill a bottle of vodka? Or did you think these things were hard to get before the government began regulating their manufacture, distribution and sale?
Someone already made the "21 years" joke.
You're probably thinking of second-hand toxin.
I'm thinking of America's for-profit healthcare system combined with "we demand you give him the best" snowflakes. THAT affects others more than a bit of odor at the bus station.
Wow! That was good. I laughed at that reply. Kudos to you and thanks for the chuckle.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Hopefully red/green color is not the only indicator of test results as doing so would violate a fundamental rule of UI design: never use color as the sole means of conveying a piece of information. The elderly, colorblind, and people with malfunctioning devices might interpret the results incorrectly.