A pioneer of the “Electronic Nose” delivered Technion UK’s Ron Arad lecture in London.

Professor Hossam Haick from the Technion in Haifa, an expert in the field of nanotechnology and non-invasive disease diagnosis, delivered a lecture at the Royal College of Physicians on the developments into his pioneering research into nanoarrays that he is using to identify disease biomarkers as a novel diagnostic tool.

The professor is an Israeli-Christian Arab scientist and engineer and is the pioneer of the Electronic Nose — a medical device that can sniff out 17 specific diseases in a person’s breath, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, tuberculosis, diabetes and lung cancer.

Professor Haick told the audience: “Every disease has a unique signature, known as what we call a ‘breath print’. The challenge is to bring the best science we have proven into reality by developing a smaller device that captures all the components of a disease that appear in the breath.”

He demonstrated how advances in his research have the potential to identify diseases though sensors in mobile phones and wearable technology. From analysing 3,700 volunteers, the technology under development at the Technion also has the potential to predict the occurrence of cancer in the future, based on results of healthy people that are currently under diagnosis with the breath analysis.

“We cannot develop this technology in Israel without developing the best science. The integration between the software, machine learning and academic intelligence will make a critical change in the early detection and prevention of cancerous diseases.”

Daniel Peltz, chairman of Technion UK said: “We’re delighted to welcome Professor Haick to London to showcase this latest progressive innovation in cancer research.

“Technion students are brilliant at challenging, creating and inventing — skills which Professor Haick exemplifies.”