Funding tool: Basic research projects
Project-ID: LS11-017
Project start: 01. September 2012
Project end: will follow
Runtime: 24 months / finished
Funding amount: € 295.000,00

Brief summary:

Lung cancer (LC) is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide and like any other malignancy the chance of cure widely depends on the clinical stage at detection. Early detection of LC is a vision physicians have been following since many decades. Various concepts have been scrutinized during the past thirty years and finally dismissed. Comprehensive LC screening by means of serial chest CT recently has been shown to be effective, however is compromised by high costs and radiation exposure. The focus therefore is on non invasive and economical mehods to screen a maximum number of persons at risk for lung cancer.

This prospective clinical study aims at reproducibly detecting lung cancer of any histological subtype and clinical stage from exhaled air. The method of respiration gas analysis has recently gained significant interest due to very promising scientific achievements. However, results so far have been limited due to small study collectives and low statistical power. The proposed investigational methods using trained sniffer dogs, analytical instruments or multisensoric devices like the eNOSE still provide quite divergent results.

As preliminary work to this proposal our working group verified equivalency in the first comparison of these methods, revealing independent strength for each.
On one hand sniffer dogs possibly may provide the highest level of positive predictivity to which eNOSEs may provide differential diagnoses whereas high end methods may be favourable in the long run to analyse complex sets of markers in huge data bases of central laboratories.

The scientific project entitled „Steps to lung cancer screening“ addresses questions which are equally crucial in local and national settings: realistic subject collectives, detection tolerance of the differential diagnostic potential of eNOSE devices towards local environmental influences and discrimination of relevant co-variables like smoking habits and pulmonary diseases. In a second step the detection pattern of a single qualified eNOSE will be transfered to comparable
systems by calibration using generated marker sets.

This working group therefore includes the leading institute for respiratory gas analyses and experts for data fusion. In addition both K9-units having been involved and trained in our preliminary study have agreed to participate again.

This project wil be implemented as multicentric study of lower Austria enrolling matrix collectives recruited from private offices, federal hospitals and the biggest pulmological center of Austria, associated to the Karl-Landsteiner Society for the study of thoracic malignancies.

The projected outcome of this multicentric clinical study are the evaluation of the medical and technical feasability of respiratory gas analyses for the purpose of lung cancer screening, the value of combining different methods and supporting compentency and excellency in lower Austria and surrounding areas in achiving this goal.

Keywords:
eNose Schnüffelhunde Bronchialkarzinom Studie Realbedingungen