A Cancer-Sniffing Electronic Nose

January 3, 2007

“You simply exhale on the instrument, and it will tell if the person is healthy or has cancer. The challenge for us and for the project is to differentiate between the different stages of the disease. But with the support of the grant, we hope to overcome that challenge,” Haick reported to ISRAEL21c. It will be a four-year project conducted in Haifa on the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology campus, where Haick is a leading chemical engineer and senior lecturer.

Electronic noses are one example of a growing research area called biomimetics, or biomimicry, which involves human-made applications patterned on natural phenomena. An odor is composed of molecules, each of which has a specific size and shape; each of these molecules has a receptor of a corresponding size and shape in the human nose. When a specific receptor receives a molecule, it sends a signal to the brain, which identifies the smell associated with that particular molecule. Electronic noses based on the biological model work in a similar manner, substituting sensors for the receptors and transmitting the signal to a program, instead of the brain, for processing.

The grant proposal was submitted a year ago and received in November. The grant, one of 29 awarded this year, is part of the EU’s efforts to strengthen and encourage young, promising scientists and will allow Haick to upgrade his lab and hire researchers in and outside of Israel to form his “excellence team.”

Upon the completion of Haick’s PhD at the Technion, he received a Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with electronic noses and devices for the NASA space shuttle. Because of Israel’s excellent reputation in science, he was highly respected among his colleagues at Caltech. At a time when Arab Christians are being persecuted in Palestinian-governed Bethlehem, we thought God’s blessings upon this Israeli Christian Arab were particularly newsworthy. For more information: Tel: 972-4-829-3087
[email protected]; www.rbni.technion.ac.il

By Charleeda Sprinkle

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