Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
“Forty-two years after Dr. Leonard H. “Bones” McCoy first waved his tricorder over a patient to make a diagnosis in the original Star Trek, scientists yesterday presented the basis for a handheld electronic nose to detect the most common kind of cancer.”
How can you beat that as an opener from the Philadelphia Inquirer?
But the basis of this research comes not from science fiction but from dogs, which have apparently been known to sniff out cancer in people (for examples see the Scotsman). Now scientists claim to have identified the difference in odours between people with skin cancer and healthy people that might lead to the development of new methods for cancer screening (press release).
According to the press release, researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, sampled air above basal cell tumors in 11 patients and above the same site in 11 healthy volunteers. The air was analysed for volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, produced by the human skin, “many of which are odorous”. They found that while the air above both healthy skin and the cancer contained the same chemicals, the amounts of some chemicals varied, creating a different chemical profile. The findings were reported at the annual conference of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.
“Our findings may someday allow doctors to screen for and diagnose skin cancers at very early stages,” says author Michelle Gallagher in the press release.
The researchers have previously reported on the differences in VOCs with age from 25 healthy men and women, published online in the British Journal of Dermatology.
The BBC quotes Carolyn Willis, from Amersham Hospital in Buckinghamshire, who uses dogs to detect bladder cancer from the changes in the smell of urine, as saying, “This has great potential as a screening tool. The detection of these volatile organic compounds could make a major contribution to diagnosis.”
But the key word there is potential. Much larger studies are needed to find out whether a skin cancer test could be developed according to Lara Bennett, from Cancer Research UK in the Scotsman.
Jean-Claude Bystryn, former head of the melanoma program and vaccine clinic at New York University Medical Center, says in the Washington Post:
In terms of this replacing the standard method we have of diagnosing skin cancer, which is basically to look at a specimen under the microscope, it’s hard to imagine this would do it completely. Because when you’re dealing with cancer, the margin for error is really small. You don’t want to miss something that may be a cancer that then doesn’t get treated. And you don’t want to treat someone for cancer if they actually have something else. So, it’s really a very novel and interesting idea but one which I think really needs to be further researched and carefully confirmed.
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