With a $1.3 million grant from the National Science foundation, engineers from the University of California, Irvine, are developing a cheap and disposable breath analysis device that can immediately detect a lung infection, similar to the breathalyzer used by police to monitor blood alcohol levels.

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Timely knowledge of a lung infection could allow patients with cystic fibrosis or other inflammatory respiratory conditions to seek medical help immediately, preventing life-shortening irreversible damage to the already weak respiratory system.

Filippo Capolino, an electrical engineer, and materials scientist Regina Ragan have built a nano-optical sensor that is capable of detecting minute traces of infection in a small breath sample. Although the pair created the sensor in a laboratory, they would like to see the device being made available to the public.

Aside from checking possible medical conditions, the device could be altered to observe conditions in the environment, such as identifying dangerous airborne chemicals that originate from chemical industry practices or automotive exhausts.

Nanotechnologies such as the sensor rely on exceptionally minute, nanometer-scale building blocks. For comparison, the width of a human hair is 100,000 times bigger than a nanometer. Manufacturing in the tiny scale has big hurdles, since the majority of existing techniques that are able to attain a high level of precision are too slow and too expensive to be viable for production.

"With support from the NSF and input from industry, our goal is to help nanoscale manufacturing processes leave the laboratory - where they've been confined - and become usable in widespread commercial applications," said Ragan, associate professor of chemical engineering & materials science and principal investigator on the project.

This grant highlights the strength of our faculty in both nanosciences and advanced manufacturing," said Gregory Washington, dean of The Henry Samueli School of Engineering. "The Samueli School is poised to move forward as a force in this area."

Tagsnanotechnology, National Science Foundation, University of California Irvine, Lung infection, Lung infection diagnosis, Lung condition, asthma, Cystic Fibrosis