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Harnessing insect olfactory neural circuits for noninvasive detection of human cancer

Alexander Farnum, Michael Parnas, Ehsanul Hoque Apu, Elyssa Cox, Noël Lefevre, Christopher H. Contag, Debajit Saha
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.24.493311
Alexander Farnum
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Michael Parnas
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Ehsanul Hoque Apu
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Elyssa Cox
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Noël Lefevre
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Christopher H. Contag
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
2Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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Debajit Saha
1Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
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  • For correspondence: sahadeb3@msu.edu
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Abstract

There is overwhelming evidence that metabolic processes are altered in cancer cells and these changes are manifested in the volatile organic compound (VOC) composition of exhaled breath. Here, we take a novel approach of an insect olfactory neural circuit-based VOC sensor for cancer detection. We combined an in vivo antennae-attached insect brain with an electrophysiology platform and employed biological neural computation rules of antennal lobe circuitry for data analysis to achieve our goals. Our results demonstrate that three different human oral cancers can be robustly distinguished from each other and from a non-cancer oral cell line by analyzing individual cell culture VOC composition-evoked olfactory neural responses in the insect antennal lobe. By evaluating cancer vs. non-cancer VOC-evoked population neural responses, we show that olfactory neurons’ response-based classification of oral cancer is sensitive and reliable. Moreover, this brain-based cancer detection approach is very fast (detection time ~ 250 ms). We also demonstrate that this cancer detection technique is effective across changing chemical environments mimicking natural conditions. Our brain-based cancer detection system comprises a novel VOC sensing methodology that will spur the development of more forward engineering technologies for noninvasive detection of cancer.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted May 25, 2022.
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Harnessing insect olfactory neural circuits for noninvasive detection of human cancer
Alexander Farnum, Michael Parnas, Ehsanul Hoque Apu, Elyssa Cox, Noël Lefevre, Christopher H. Contag, Debajit Saha
bioRxiv 2022.05.24.493311; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.24.493311
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Harnessing insect olfactory neural circuits for noninvasive detection of human cancer
Alexander Farnum, Michael Parnas, Ehsanul Hoque Apu, Elyssa Cox, Noël Lefevre, Christopher H. Contag, Debajit Saha
bioRxiv 2022.05.24.493311; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.24.493311

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