March 7, 2018
Prof. Hossam Haick delivers Technion UK’s Ron Arad lecture on Cancer Sniffing Nose

LONDON, 6 March 2018 – Technion UK is proud to host the Ron Arad lecture in London. Presenting at the Royal College of Physicians, Professor Hossam Haick from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion in Israel and an expert in the field of nanotechnology and non-invasive disease diagnosis, delivered a lecture on the developments into his pioneering research into nanoarrays that he is using to identify disease biomarkers as a novel diagnostic tool.

Prof. Haick 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, Tuberculous, Diabetes and Lung Cancer. As an active innovative scientist, he has attracted the attentions of the world’s billionaires such as Bill Gates and he has been in collaboration with Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in the diagnostics of diseases.

At the lecture, Prof. Haick said, “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.’

Prof. Haick continued to demonstrate how current advances in his research has the potential to identify diseases though sensors in mobile phones and wearable technology. From analysing 3700 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 the diagnosis with the breath analysis.

He continued, “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 OBE, Chairman of Technion UK said, “We’re delighted to welcome Prof. Haick to London to showcase this latest progressive innovation in cancer research from The Technion.’

“Technion students undertake scientific research which is powering Israel’s rapid high-tech growth; our students are brilliant at challenging, creating and inventing – skills which the Prof. Haick exemplifies. The marvellous technology and advancement in non-evasive disease detection, discoveries in nanotechnology to help detect disease from someone’s breath is the future of disease detection.”