Diagnosis of Lung Cancer From Exhaled Breath With Silicon Biophotonic Device

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths throughout the world and accounts for more than 1.2M new cases worldwide annually, making lung cancer one of the most serious public health problems in industrialized countries. Up to date there is no valid screening method for lung cancer. Thus it is often diagnosed at an advance stage when treatment is less effective, which consequantly leads to high mortality rate. However, with early diagnosis and treatment, the 5-year survival rate improves dramatically from 1% in stage 4, 20% in stage 3 to 70% in stage 1 disease. Therefore early diagnosis plays a pivotal role in improving survival for this otherwise uniformly fatal disease. In recently studies, it was found that some of the products of metabolism, called volatile organic comounds (VOCs), are carried in the breath and can serve as biomarkers. Cancer cells produce different types of VOCs than normal cells do. More importantly, these VOC markers can be found in exhaled breath for cancer stages 1 through 4.

Combining the strength of IME's in the biophotonics, the research groups at NUS in basic science and the NUH clinician's knowledge and expertise in lung cancer, this proposal is aiming to tackle the challenge of lung cancer screening by developing a non-invasive, inexpensive, and accurate sensor platform to detect VOCs in exhaled breath. The device will consists of arrays of silicon micro-ring resonator sensors coated with polymers with different organic functionalities, in which each sensor is widely responsive to a variety of VOCs. In this proposal, we plan to build a prototype device and test for the detection of VOCs in exhaled breath from healthy controls and lung cancer patients. The successful outcome of this proposal would have an immense impact on lung cancer management by enabling an early stage cancer screening.