Organic Diagnostics
Why we do it?
Animal-based diagnostics have the potential to revolutionize medicine by providing faster and more effective tests, which may be particularly useful for combatting highly virulent diseases . These animal-based technologies may provide a new way to detect diseases that currently do not have a reliable diagnostic test such as depression and dementia.
What We Do
We work with researchers, industry, and the regulators (including the US-FDA) to take action to clarify the requirements for companies to receive regulatory approval and facilitate market entry for animal-based and organic diagnostics.
Who we are.
A collective of industry professionals from diverse backgrounds developing guidelines for organic diagnostic testing. The primary focus of this group is to discuss and create best practices in the area of animal and insect diagnostics and ensure the highest standards in the development and implementation of organic testing. This collective effort aims to bring the best of multiple industries to the table and positively impact the field of organic diagnostic testing.
How we do it?
We are a collective of volunteer professionals that work together to advance the Organic Diagnostics. Our fledgling community will grow understanding and attract interest via conferences, speaking at other industry events, and speaking with regulators.
Organic Diagnosis has been featured by:
Lets Start with our best friend...
Dogs can smell things at concentrations of one part in a trillion—equivalent to a single drop in 20 Olympic swimming pools. The British Medical Journal published an article in 2012 describing a dog that had been trained to detect Clostridium difficile infections in patients with remarkable accuracy. C. difficile is a common hospital-borne infection that causes toxin-mediated intestinal disease, with symptoms ranging from mild diarrhea to fatal intestinal infections. The dog, a two-year-old beagle named Cliff, accurately identified 95.3% of infections in patients exceeding the performance of FDA-approved diagnostic kits commonly used to detect C. difficile. Not only that, Cliff was fast—he could screen an entire ward of patients for C. difficile in under ten minutes with no physical contact or need to take stool samples.
2019 study, dogs were able to identify malaria infections in asymptomatic children by smelling their socks.
Multiple studies have confirmed that dogs can be trained to detectthe odor of prostate cancer in patient samples at accuracy levels between 90% and 99%, providing a more reliable alternative to conventional diagnostic methods that are only 25% accurate at screening for prostate cancer.
How is success measured?
Using a dog's superior olfactory sensitivity to identify Clostridium difficile in stools and patients: proof of principle study. Bomers MK, van Agtmael MA, Luik H, van Veen MC, Vandenbroucke-Grauls CM, Smulders YM. BMJ. 2012 Dec 13;345:e7396. doi: 10.1136/bmj.e7396. PMID: 23241268; PMCID: PMC3675697.
Battling disease,
and the cost of disease detection.
Olfactory acuity in dogs is but one option in the development of organic diagnostic testing. Insects such as bees, fruit flies, roundworms have all shown the capacity to detect human disease without invasive measures. Organic Diagnostics is a field that has a broad scope and encompasses a range of innovative solutions to address the growing need for accurate, cost-effective and non-invasive diagnosis. The potential for this field is immense, as it seeks to provide new diagnostic approaches that go beyond traditional methods.
One of the key benefits of Organic Diagnostics is the ability to detect diseases more accurately and at a fraction of the cost of traditional diagnostic methods. For example, other animals, insects and even invertebrates can be used to detect diseases in an economical, easy and non-invasive way. This could include the use of bees to detect the presence of cancer or other diseases, or the use of dogs to detect the presence of tuberculosis.
To date, the targets for Organic Diagnostics have included cancer, eplipic surves, maleria, tuberculosis, fear and aggressive outbursts in patients with psychiatric disorders. These examples show that the potential for Organic Diagnostics is wide-ranging and that it has the ability to address a range of medical challenges.
The potential for Organic Diagnostics is enormous and the innovative companies below have the ability to revolutionize the way we diagnose and treat diseases.
N-Nose,
by Hirotsu is a great example of a
"biological diagnostic"
In 2015 Hirotsu Takaaki, then a researcher at Kyushu University, in Japan, tested whether C. elegans could distinguish between the urine of people who had cancer and those who did not.
C. elegans are a type of Roundworm.
Takaaki found that the Roundworms tended to crawl towards urine from cancer patients and shy away from urine from the healthy.
The following year Dr Hirotsu founded a company to automate the process.
Early is an Israeli Startup using rats to create a a novel multi-cancer screening platform
An Israeli development by EARLY may lead to early detection of lung cancer through the use of rats' sense of smell. The system is able to detect lung cancer at a very early stage of the disease with a rate of 93%. The hope is that soon the tests for all types of cancer will be simpler, faster, and cheaper, and it may become possible to detect cancer at an early stage by performing a simple urine test at home.
BeeSense by InsectSense, a platform of possibilities
This company has developed a device that allows the utilization of bees in detecting specific VOCs.
VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) are chemicals present in the environment in extremely low quantities.
Bees have extremely sensitive olfactory receptors that can sense volatile compounds in the range of parts per billion, even parts per trillion.
This ability makes them ideal for detection of a range of diseases in humans, animals and plants.
Training bees for differentiating VOC's can be performed within a few minutes to hours, while detection only takes a few seconds.
Bees may be a cost-effective solution that makes disease-diagnosis affordable.
Organic Diagnosis has been researched by:
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