This article is an overview of the present and ongoing developments in the field of nanomaterial-based sensors for enabling fast, relatively inexpensive and minimally (or non-) invasive diagnostics ...of health conditions with follow-up by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) excreted from one or combination of human body fluids and tissues (e.g., blood, urine, breath, skin). Part of the review provides a didactic examination of the concepts and approaches related to emerging sensing materials and transduction techniques linked with the VOC-based non-invasive medical evaluations. We also present and discuss diverse characteristics of these innovative sensors, such as their mode of operation, sensitivity, selectivity and response time, as well as the major approaches proposed for enhancing their ability as hybrid sensors to afford multidimensional sensing and information-based sensing. The other parts of the review give an updated compilation of the past and currently available VOC-based sensors for disease diagnostics. This compilation summarizes all VOCs identified in relation to sickness and sampling origin that links these data with advanced nanomaterial-based sensing technologies. Both strength and pitfalls are discussed and criticized, particularly from the perspective of the information and communication era. Further ideas regarding improvement of sensors, sensor arrays, sensing devices and the proposed workflow are also included.
Hybrid Volatolomics and Disease Detection Broza, Yoav Y.; Mochalski, Pawel; Ruzsanyi, Vera ...
Angewandte Chemie (International ed.),
September 14, 2015, Volume:
54, Issue:
38
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This Review presents a concise, but not exhaustive, didactic overview of some of the main concepts and approaches related to “volatolomics”—an emerging frontier for fast, risk‐free, and potentially ...inexpensive diagnostics. It attempts to review the source and characteristics of volatolomics through the so‐called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emanating from cells and their microenvironment. It also reviews the existence of VOCs in several bodily fluids, including the cellular environment, blood, breath, skin, feces, urine, and saliva. Finally, the usefulness of volatolomics for diagnosis from a single bodily fluid, as well as ways to improve these diagnostic aspects by “hybrid” approaches that combine VOC profiles collected from two or more bodily fluids, will be discussed. The perspectives of this approach in developing the field of diagnostics to a new level are highlighted.
Ill‐gotten gains: Volatolomes enable identification of the collection of volatile organic compounds in a biological cell, tissue, or organism that are the by‐/end products of cellular processes in the living organism. The new analytical approach of volatolomics allows the large‐scale scientific study of chemical processes involving volatile organic compounds.
A new non-invasive and potentially inexpensive frontier in the diagnosis of cancer relies on the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath samples. Breath can be sampled and ...analyzed in
real-time
, leading to fascinating and cost-effective clinical diagnostic procedures. Nevertheless, breath analysis is a very young field of research and faces challenges, mainly because the biochemical mechanisms behind the cancer-related VOCs are largely unknown. In this review, we present a list of 115 validated cancer-related VOCs published in the literature during the past decade, and classify them with respect to their "fat-to-blood" and "blood-to-air" partition coefficients. These partition coefficients provide an estimation of the relative concentrations of VOCs in alveolar breath, in blood and in the fat compartments of the human body. Additionally, we try to clarify controversial issues concerning possible experimental malpractice in the field, and propose ways to translate the basic science results as well as the mechanistic understanding to tools (sensors) that could serve as point-of-care diagnostics of cancer. We end this review with a conclusion and a future perspective.
This review aims to provide an insight about the origin and utility of volatile markers in breath of cancer patients.
The importance of developing new diagnostic and detection technologies for the growing number of clinical challenges is rising each year. Here, we present a concise, yet didactic review on a new ...diagnostics frontier based on the detection of disease-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by means of nanomaterial-based sensors. Nanomaterials are ideal for such sensor arrays because they are easily fabricated, chemically versatile and can be integrated into currently available sensing platforms. Following a general introduction, we provide a brief description of the VOC-related diseases concept. Then, we focus on detection of VOC-related diseases by selective and crossreactive sensing approaches, through chemical, optical and mechanical transducers incorporating the most important classes of nanomaterials. Selected examples of the integration of nanomaterials into selective sensors and crossreactive sensor arrays are given. We conclude with a brief discussion on the integration possibilities of different types of nanomaterials into sensor arrays, and the expected outcomes and limitations.
This article aims to review nature-inspired chemical sensors for enabling fast, relatively inexpensive, and minimally (or non-) invasive diagnostics and follow-up of the health conditions. It can be ...achieved via monitoring of biomarkers and volatile biomarkers, that are excreted from one or combination of body fluids (breath, sweat, saliva, urine, seminal fluid, nipple aspirate fluid, tears, stool, blood, interstitial fluid, and cerebrospinal fluid). The first part of the review gives an updated compilation of the biomarkers linked with specific sickness and/or sampling origin. The other part of the review provides a didactic examination of the concepts and approaches related to the emerging chemistries, sensing materials, and transduction techniques used for biomarker-based medical evaluations. The strengths and pitfalls of each approach are discussed and criticized. Future perspective with relation to the information and communication era is presented and discussed.
This article reports on a noninvasive approach in detecting and following-up individuals who are at-risk or have an existing COVID-19 infection, with a potential ability to serve as an epidemic ...control tool. The proposed method uses a developed breath device composed of a nanomaterial-based hybrid sensor array with multiplexed detection capabilities that can detect disease-specific biomarkers from exhaled breath, thus enabling rapid and accurate diagnosis. An exploratory clinical study with this approach was examined in Wuhan, China, during March 2020. The study cohort included 49 confirmed COVID-19 patients, 58 healthy controls, and 33 non-COVID lung infection controls. When applicable, positive COVID-19 patients were sampled twice: during the active disease and after recovery. Discriminant analysis of the obtained signals from the nanomaterial-based sensors achieved very good test discriminations between the different groups. The training and test set data exhibited respectively 94% and 76% accuracy in differentiating patients from controls as well as 90% and 95% accuracy in differentiating between patients with COVID-19 and patients with other lung infections. While further validation studies are needed, the results may serve as a base for technology that would lead to a reduction in the number of unneeded confirmatory tests and lower the burden on hospitals, while allowing individuals a screening solution that can be performed in PoC facilities. The proposed method can be considered as a platform that could be applied for any other disease infection with proper modifications to the artificial intelligence and would therefore be available to serve as a diagnostic tool in case of a new disease outbreak.
Analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is a promising approach for non-invasive, fast and potentially inexpensive diagnostics. Here, we present a new methodology for profiling the body ...chemistry by using the volatile fraction of molecules in various body fluids. Using mass spectrometry and cross-reactive nanomaterial-based sensors array, we demonstrate that simultaneous VOC detection from breath and skin would provide complementary, non-correlated information of the body's volatile metabolites profile. Eventually with further wide population validation studies, such a methodology could provide more accurate monitoring of pathological changes compared to the information provided by a single body fluid. The qualitative and quantitative methods presented here offers a variety of options for novel mapping of the metabolic properties of complex organisms, including humans.
Conventional diagnostic methods for lung cancer are unsuitable for widespread screening because they are expensive and occasionally miss tumours. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry studies have ...shown that several volatile organic compounds, which normally appear at levels of 1-20 ppb in healthy human breath, are elevated to levels between 10 and 100 ppb in lung cancer patients. Here we show that an array of sensors based on gold nanoparticles can rapidly distinguish the breath of lung cancer patients from the breath of healthy individuals in an atmosphere of high humidity. In combination with solid-phase microextraction, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry was used to identify 42 volatile organic compounds that represent lung cancer biomarkers. Four of these were used to train and optimize the sensors, demonstrating good agreement between patient and simulated breath samples. Our results show that sensors based on gold nanoparticles could form the basis of an inexpensive and non-invasive diagnostic tool for lung cancer.
Sodium is a prominent prognostic biomarker for assessing health status, such as dysnatremia. As of now, detection and monitoring of sodium levels in the human body is carried out by means of ...laborious and bulky laboratory equipmentand/or by offline analysis of various body fluids. Herein, an innovative stretchable, skin‐conformal and fast‐response microneedle extended‐gate FET biosensor is reported for real‐time detection of sodium in interstitial fluids for minimally invasive health monitoring along with high sensitivity, low limit of detection, excellent biocompatibility, and on‐body mechanical stability. The integration of the reported device with a wireless‐data transmitter and the Internet‐of‐Things cloud for real‐time monitoring and long‐term analysis is reported and discussed. This platform would eventually help bringing unlimited possibilities for effecient medical care and accurate clinical decision‐making.
A stretchable microneedle‐based extended gate field effect transistor for minimally invasive detection of sodium in the interstitial fluids and for real‐time health monitoring is reported. The device exhibits excellent biocompatibility, and on‐body mechanical stability and enables transfer of data via Internet‐of‐Things platforms.
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