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A Shanghai hospital is working with a UK biotechnology company to launch clinical trials of a cancer screening method through respiratory tests, a huge potential to become a simple, non-invasive and less expensive way early diagnosis of various cancers. .
This is the first time that such a technology arrives on the Chinese mainland, said Monday the Renji hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Chinese partner of the Sino-British project, at a signing ceremony with Owlstone Medical, based in Cambridge. .
The British company will supply its patented devices and training, while the Shanghai Hospital will provide a laboratory space and a research team.
Test subjects should only wear a breathalyzer and breathe for several minutes when the device checks for the presence of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The test takes the whole body, the doctors said.
VOCs are produced as the end product of metabolic processes in the human body. Underlying changes in metabolic activity can produce VOC patterns characteristic of specific diseases, they said.
Owlstone said on his website that the device uses a chemical sensor on a tiny silicon chip.
Wang Liwei, director of the laboratory, said the China-UK team was working on a detailed proposal for the test, which includes setting standards for revealing VOCs and the slice of ## 147 ## Age of subjects. Trials should begin in three months.
"Such tests have been conducted in the UK on 4,000 people and have reached a satisfactory accuracy rate for a clinical application, so it could soon be approved for use in the UK," said Wang.
He said the hospital will initially conduct lung cancer trials, the most common form of cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths in China. The target of the tests is an accuracy of 70%.
With a total of 787,000 newly diagnosed patients each year, lung cancer is leading the incidence of malignant tumors in China and accounts for nearly one-quarter of cancer deaths in the country, according to the National Cancer Center.
"Such a rapid and non-invasive screening method will reduce the cost of medical treatments for individuals and society as a whole and improve the overall early diagnosis and survival rate of cancer patients," Wang said.
Chris Hodkinson, vice president of business development at Owlstone Medical, said the cooperation would improve technology and ultimately benefit more cancer patients at home and abroad.
Experts said that VOCs from all parts of the body were captured in the breath of a person, making the technology applicable to a wide range of cancers.
"We plan to extend screening technology to other cancers, including gastric cancer and bowel cancer, for which the current detection methods – gastroscopy and enteroscopy – are rather painful, and pancreatic cancer, hard to discover, "said Wang.
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