Breathe out: How the mobile phone breathalyser is going to work
Imagine blowing into your mobile phone to check whether you have cancer. That might sound fanciful – and even scary – but scientists at a British firm say they are now just two years away from making it happen.
The inventors, at Cambridge University spin-off company Owlstone, have already created a desktop ‘disease breathalyser’ which is proven to work.
Now they are miniaturising their technology further, to create a small add-on device that simply slots into the base of a mobile.
Owlstone co-founder Billy Boyle says: ‘To make a standalone hand-held device, or a module that attaches to a mobile phone, is as little as two years away. It’s just a question of getting the investment.’
The firm – set up a decade ago by three engineering graduates – started out making machines to help oil firms detect contamination, and US anti-terror agencies pick up traces of explosives.
But 18 months ago Belfast-born Boyle decided to take the firm into the medical arena after his girlfriend Kate, the mother of their four-year-old twins Oscar and Isaac, was diagnosed with colon cancer.
She was only 34 at the time.
‘Kate was taken into hospital with stomach pains,’ Boyle says.
‘That day, she had emergency surgery. We then found out she had Stage 4 colon cancer.’
He read up on statistics for the disease, which hits 40,000 people in Britain every year, and was shocked by how much early detection determines survival – and how hard diagnosis can be.
‘If it’s detected at Stage 1, the chances of survival are 90 per cent,’ says Boyle, 35. ‘At Stage 4, it drops to six per cent.’
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