Stumbling upon the next generation of breath diagnostics isn’t the traditional path for a deep tech startup — but Detect-ION is neither traditional nor unaccustomed to new explorations, according to founder Ashish Chaudhary.
Now, Detect-ION has launched a pilot project with Moffitt Cancer Center to "revolutionize" lung cancer early detection by introducing rapid, non-invasive, point-of-care breath diagnostics to the market.
"Since local therapy for early-stage lung cancer is associated with a substantially greater likelihood of cure, our pilot seeks to provide an additional approach for early detection of the disease,” Matthew Schabath, the co-pilot of the project and co-leader of the Cancer Epidemiology Program at Moffitt Cancer Center, said in a statement. “We will begin with late-stage patients to identify robust VOC biomarkers and if successful, we will conduct a follow-up study on early-stage patients to determine the potential for early detection.”
Headquartered in Tampa, Detect-ION was founded in 2021 to develop sensors and systems that detect trace chemical signatures in ambient air for strategic intelligence collection and early warning systems.
Chaudhary, who also serves as CTO and CEO, spent 15 years in corporate research and development at SRI International before “quitting the rat race” to set up Detect-ION, where he says the vision was to bring mass spectrometry to the masses.
“For example, if [people] are cooking up something like explosives, they need precursors. And there can be outgassing and gasses coming off from those processes,” Chaudhary said. “But if you're able to intervene in time, you can actually detect nefarious activity. So that was the whole paradigm.”
It just so happened that the same technology could be applied to breath diagnostics.
“[When] a human exhales breath, the breath has a whole number of volatile organic compounds, and those compounds can be linked to certain infections that that human is carrying,” Chaudhary said.
The discovery was triggered in 2020.
“I said, well, if we can sample air, what is the difference between air and breath? “Chaudhary said. “The big difference is breath is highly saturated, so there's a lot of water vapor content" — which leads to the system clogging.
Chaudhary noted the long delays that come with sending in proposals to government agencies and decided to reach out to Schabath.
Leveraging the existing benchmark testing Moffitt is doing for lung cancer patients, Chaudhary said the size of Detect-ION’s dual-use technological discovery — along with their portability — was key to receiving the go-ahead.
"There's a lot of people who've never actually smoked, who develop lung cancer — it’s cost a lot of lives,” Chaudhary said. “The time is now to act on it.”
He said despite still “turning wheels” on traditional collaborations with the Department of Defense in chemical threat detection and warfighter protection, the bigger opportunity is in health tech.
Because VOCs can also be detected in liquid mediums, Chaudhary said the Detect-ION team hopes the data gained from the initial study can expand the partnership with Moffitt and inform the detection and diagnosis of other cancers, such as prostate, colorectal, pancreas and liver.
“Once we get to an FDA approval, we will have to pivot pretty hard ... that’s really where the biggest impact could be,” Chaudhary said. “It's an innovation startup company bootstrapped; with a whole lot of promise.”
