A breath test could diagnose pneumonia in minutes

一项呼气测试有望在几分钟内诊断出肺炎

With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. 麻省理工学院（MIT）正在开发的一项测试，未来可能让肺炎及其他肺部疾病的诊断变得像对着管子呼气一样简单。这项名为“PlasmoSniff”的测试是一种便携式芯片级传感器，能够捕获并检测生物标志物——即预示疾病的合成化合物。

The idea is that a person would first breathe in nanoparticles that are specially designed to attach to these biomarkers, detaching from them only in the presence of specific enzymes that the body produces during an infection. Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, and her lab have been working on such nanoparticle sensors for years. 其原理是：患者首先吸入专门设计的纳米颗粒，这些颗粒会附着在生物标志物上，只有在人体感染时产生的特定酶存在的情况下，才会与之分离。Sangeeta Bhatia 教授（1993年获硕士学位，1997年获博士学位）及其实验室多年来一直致力于此类纳米颗粒传感器的研究。

If the person is healthy, the particles would eventually circulate out of the body intact. In someone with a disease such as pneumonia, however, the enzymes would snip off the biomarkers, freeing them to be exhaled and measured. 如果受试者身体健康，这些颗粒最终会完整地排出体外。然而，对于患有肺炎等疾病的人来说，体内的酶会切断生物标志物，使其被释放出来，从而可以通过呼气进行测量。

In a 2020 paper, Bhatia’s lab demonstrated that the nanoparticles could be used to detect pneumonia in the breath of mice, but the measurements required laboratory-grade instruments not available in most doctor’s offices. 在2020年的一篇论文中，Bhatia的实验室证明了这些纳米颗粒可用于检测小鼠呼气中的肺炎，但当时的测量需要实验室级别的仪器，而大多数医生诊所并不具备这种条件。

Now Loza Tadesse, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and her colleagues have shown they can detect exhaled biomarkers of pneumonia at extremely low concentrations using an enhanced form of Raman spectroscopy, an optical technique in which molecules are illuminated with light. They plan to incorporate the new sensor into a handheld instrument that could be used in clinical settings or at home. 现在，机械工程助理教授Loza Tadesse及其同事展示了他们可以通过一种增强型拉曼光谱技术（一种利用光照射分子的光学技术），检测出极低浓度的呼出肺炎生物标志物。他们计划将这种新型传感器集成到手持设备中，以便在临床环境或家庭中使用。

“We envision that a patient would inhale nanoparticles and, within about 10 minutes, exhale a synthetic biomarker that reports on lung status,” says Aditya Garg, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the work. Detecting diseases like pneumonia is not the system’s only potential application. “It can sniff out industrial chemicals or airborne pollutants as well,” Tadesse says. “我们的设想是，患者吸入纳米颗粒后，在大约10分钟内呼出一种合成生物标志物，从而报告肺部状况，”该研究论文的第一作者、MIT博士后Aditya Garg表示。检测肺炎等疾病并非该系统的唯一潜在应用。Tadesse补充道：“它还可以探测工业化学品或空气污染物。”