Volatile organic compounds: A promising new frontier for cancer screening

Abstract

The late onset of cancer symptoms can cause a significant delay in diagnosis, impacting patients’ prognosis and quality of life, thus prompting a need for alternative screening and detection methods. Neoplastic processes cause distinct and immediate changes to the body’s metabolism, creating unique patterns in the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced and released through exhaled breath. For this reason, VOC profiles have emerged as diagnostic indicators for several types of malignancies, facilitating early cancer detection. Both non-invasive and accessible, the analysis of breath VOCs for cancer screening and detection has gained recognition as a new frontier in cancer diagnostics. Using exhaled breath instead of gold-standard cancer detection and screening tools that are traditionally invasive and uncomfortable for the patient could be revolutionary in improving patient compliance. Further, compared to the gold-standard tools, breath testing is relatively inexpensive, and the method of analysis, storage, and transporting the samples is simplified. Several studies have demonstrated the accuracy of VOC analysis in detecting various types of cancer, including breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, gastric cancer, and melanoma. This article summarizes the evidence supporting VOC analysis for cancer screening and detection. It reviews the clinical utility, current limitations, and necessity for standardization across all VOC screening tools to ensure the standardization and reliability of measurements. The evidence supporting breath tests to detect cancer accurately is strong, demonstrating that VOC sampling improves patient outcomes and decreases the global burden of malignant conditions by detecting cancer earlier.