{"id":583733,"date":"2026-04-03T22:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T22:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/583733\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T22:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T22:39:09","slug":"this-new-sensor-could-sniff-out-pneumonia-on-a-persons-breath-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/583733\/","title":{"rendered":"This New Sensor Could Sniff Out Pneumonia on a Person’s Breath : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Waiting for chest X-rays or lab results to diagnose pneumonia<\/a> and other lung-related diseases may not be necessary in the future. Researchers have developed a portable sensor prototype that has the potential to detect such conditions on a person’s breath.<\/p>\n

It is designed to work by analyzing nanoparticles that a patient inhales first. When those nanoparticles are then exhaled, they carry attached biomarkers that can reveal evidence of disease deep inside the body<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The prototype was developed by a team from MIT, and is called PlasmoSniff.<\/p>\n

It has not yet been tested in humans, only mice, which means more work is needed to get this ready for a doctor’s office. That said, the research team is hopeful about their idea.<\/p>\n

With further testing, they think the sensor could be a quick and convenient asset in clinics or even the home, with no need for laboratory-grade electronics typically only found in hospitals.<\/p>\n

\"BreathThe sensor is designed to sift through volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath. (Garg et al., Nano Lett., 2026)<\/p>\n

“In practice, we envision that a patient would inhale nanoparticles and, within about 10 minutes, exhale a synthetic biomarker that reports on lung status,” says<\/a> mechanical engineer Aditya Garg.<\/p>\n

“Our new PlasmoSniff technology would enable detection of these exhaled biomarkers within minutes at the point of care.”<\/p>\n

The nanoparticles that the sensor detects have been in development for several years<\/a>. The biomarkers or chemical tags bundled with them become detached when they come into contact with specific protease enzymes<\/a> (tiny snippets of proteins) unique to certain diseases.<\/p>\n

That gives researchers a signal to look out for \u2013 but these biomarkers are only exhaled in very small quantities. To detect those subtle traces, this new system uses an approach called plasmonics<\/a> (the study and manipulation of light), which is where the PlasmoSniff name comes from.<\/p>\n

Specifically, the sensor relies on a technique known as Raman spectroscopy<\/a>, where light is used to measure the vibrations of a molecule. These vibrations act as signatures for the movement of atoms within chemical bonds and can be used to identify molecules.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

The sensor itself uses gold nanoparticles suspended over a thin gold film \u2013 gold being an ideal metal for plasmonics. The water-coated, microscopic gaps inside the sensor trap the target biomarkers and amplify their vibrations enough to be spotted.<\/p>\n

Human breath is packed<\/a> with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), indicating everything from the state of our gut microbiome<\/a> to how efficiently<\/a> the body’s metabolic processes are running, but this newly designed sensor picks out just a tiny fraction of the chemicals exhaled.<\/p>\n

“This is a needle-in-a-haystack problem,” says<\/a> mechanical engineer Loza Tadesse.<\/p>\n

“Our method detects that needle that would otherwise be embedded in the noise.”<\/p>\n

The researchers are at the prototype stage for now: they used mice rather than people to test the sensor and only scanned for one specific biomarker.<\/p>\n

Testing on human breath will be more complicated, and the researchers also need to develop a mask-like attachment that can be used to analyze a patient’s breath<\/a> across a period of five minutes or so.<\/p>\n

This would be combined with a device similar to an asthma inhaler to breathe in the nanoparticles. In healthy individuals, these nanoparticles would simply circulate out of the body without being broken down by disease.<\/p>\n

If development and scaling are successful over the coming years, this could be a significant new method for monitoring and detecting disease<\/a> \u2013 one which the researchers say can be adapted for a wide variety of purposes, not just checking for respiratory issues such as pneumonia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Related: Tiny Robots Have Successfully Cleared Pneumonia From The Lungs of Mice<\/a><\/p>\n

There might even be uses for PlasmoSniff outside of human health, in any situation where small traces of chemicals need to be detected in the air with a portable sensor.<\/p>\n

“It’s not just limited to these biomarkers or even diagnostic applications,” says<\/a> Tadesse.<\/p>\n

“It can sniff out industrial chemicals or airborne pollutants as well. If a molecule can form hydrogen bonds with water, we can use its vibrational fingerprint to detect it. It’s a pretty universal platform.”<\/p>\n

The research has been published in Nano Letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Waiting for chest X-rays or lab results to diagnose pneumonia and other lung-related diseases may not be necessary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,2967,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-583733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-msft-content","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}