BLOOMINGTON, MN (PRWEB) March 25, 2015

Researchers at Ancon Medical Inc. have made a breakthrough in nanoparticle technology that will enable broader and less invasive screening for cancer, tuberculosis and many other diseases with a simple breath screen. The Minnesota-based medical device maker will move ahead on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process and is targeting a fall 2016 launch of the innovative Nanoparticle Biomarker Tagging device.

Ancon Medicals nanoparticle breakthrough comes as scientists continue to find ways to use nanotechnology in cancer treatment, as this week researchers at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute announced the development of a pancreatic cancer treatment that can reduce the need for chemotherapy, according to Phys.org on March 24.

Though known for their microscopic size, NBT works by using nanoparticles to make certain molecules appear bigger and easier to detect. NBT technology can detect the presence of a wide array of diseases just by testing an individuals breath for biomarker molecules that serve as a chemical fingerprint for the disease.

Detecting individual molecules is extremely challenging, but doing so opens a whole world of medical screening possibilities said Ancon Medical President Wesley Baker. For more than a decade, researchers at Ancon Medical have been working with nanotechnology in order to make NBT technology the most sensitive breath screening disease detection technology available.

Nanotechnology made the goal of single molecule discovery possible for researchers at Ancon Medical, who were working in aerosol science to find a method of breath screening for disease detection, Baker said.

At first, Ancon Medical researchers were focused on technology that allowed nanoparticles to be enlarged through means of nucleation and condensation so they could be detected with visual equipment such as photomultipliers. In the 1990s, Ancon Medical researchers were successful in their ability to detect a single molecule of sulfuric acid using this technology. However, this nucleation-condensation detection technology based on aerosol science was effective for only certain chemicals, giving the technology limited overall practical application.

We needed to find a way to take what we had discovered in aerosol technology and apply it more broadly. Then, nanotechnology came along and gave us the breakthrough we needed, Baker said.

In 2002, Ancon Medical researchers expanded on their discoveries by working on ways to enlarge a molecule to make it easily detectable. Advances in nanotechnology made it possible to tag molecules with nanoparticles that would increase the molecules size to that of the tagging nanoparticle. Thus, it became possible for Ancon Medical researchers to detect any molecule, regardless of its chemical nature.

This breakthrough eliminated the chemical limitations of existing molecular detection methods and paved the way for the creation of Ancon Medicals NBT technology, which utilizes both aerosol science and nanotechnology to be able to detect individual molecules in an individuals exhaled breath.

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Ancon Medical Researchers Make Nanotechnology Breakthrough for Disease Screening Technology