Wearable Gas Sensor for Disease Detection
MIE Associate Professor Hongli (Julie) Zhu, in collaboration with Vox Biomedical, LLC and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was awarded a $154K grant for biosensors.
Humans emit an array of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as part of normal metabolism. There are metabolic shifts in many disease states, and animals with highly sensitive olfactory systems can be trained to identify patients with certain diseases based on their characteristic scent. Animal olfaction, while highly accurate in some contexts, is hampered by a lack of reproducibility and the need for intensive training of individual animals, limiting wider implementation for disease diagnosis. We seek to translate detection of these unique skin VOC signatures to a more robust and standardized platform, readily adaptable for the identification of a variety of human diseases with distinct pathophysiologies.