Grant: Project Grant

Early detection is crucial to increasing the survival rate of lung cancer and reduces the cost of treatment. If lung cancer can be detected early in the pre-invasive stage, the 5-year survival is >90%. However, with conventional diagnostic techniques, lung cancer is generally asymptomatic until it has reached an advanced stage, when the treatment outcome is poor. In the past decade, great progresses have been made for improving central airway lung cancer detection due to the development of new optical technologies for endoscopy. However, these optical technologies have not been applied to the detection of periphery lung cancers due to technical challenges. Periphery lung lesions are usually spotted by X-ray computed tomography (CT) as nodules on the images. Then radial ultrasound imaging (under bronchoscopy/virtual CT guidance) plus biopsy are conducted to determine if a nodule is malignant or benign. However, this procedure is associated with very high false positives. We are interested in developing optical technologies for improving periphery lung cancer detection through bronchoscope. In this project, we will focus on an optical technology called Laser-Raman spectroscopy (LRS). LRS (based on inelastic light scattering) probes molecular vibrations and gives very specific, fingerprint-like spectral features and has high accuracy for differentiation between malignant and benign cells/tissues. We hope to develop LRS into a new clinical tool for improving periphery lung cancer diagnosis, potentially without the need of biopsy or with significantly reduced number of biopsies. The technology developed will be licensed to our partner - Verisante Technology, Inc. for commercialization.