Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 47th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : 2020 -
Volatile small molecule metabolites have been used for the diagnosis of diseases since the old days of BC. However, the details began to be explained scientifically only about 40 years ago. In recent years, with the rapid progress of analytical instruments, more detailed chemical information associated with diseases (particularly, cancer) has been elucidated. Recently, our research group has established for the first time in the world a novel technology to diagnose oral cancer from odorous volatiles excreted in saliva through the analytical identification of extracted 12 volatile metabolites, which are divided into three groups, such as "newly produced", "increased or decreased", and "disappeared" groups. The saliva samples from 12 cancer patients and 8 healthy volunteers were precisely analyzed using a GC/MS. According to the analysis, it was possible to determine the presence or absence of cancer with a reliability of 90% or more. The result of this study was that we were able to clarify the odor information of oral cancer, but it is highly likely that such volatile metabolites related to lung cancer, stomach cancer, etc. can be identified by a similar method. In the near future, we believe that the current study can be a new tool to realize a new medical diagnostic based on odors excreted from the human body. In parallel, we have progressed the development of measuring instruments that can diagnose cancer simply via human breath blowing.
