This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Wayt Gibbs.Imagine getting screened for early-stage lung cancer simply by taking a deep breath from an inhaler and then peeing into a cup.Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor of health sciences and engineering at M.I.T., described how that might be possible in a TED talk she gave in 2016:"What if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world?It sounds a little like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that."Bhatia's idea was to invent nontoxic nanoprobes that doctors could put inside your blood or lungs or gut to detect tiny tumors when they're easier to treat―before they grow big enough to spread throughout the body and damage vital organs."I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy or a mammogram or a pap smear,that you could get a shot, wait an hour and do a urine test on a paper strip."In 2017 Bhatia's team reported a proof-of-concept experiment in Nature Biomedical Engineeringthat demonstrated nanoprobes like this working to detect early-stage ovarian cancer in mice.And now the group has refined this technology further to create a screening test for lung cancer that is more sensitive than the CT scans used today.
