There is an urgent need for a bedside device to allow rapid diagnosis of toxic alcohol, chemical weapon, or pesticide poisoning, to improve the timeliness and specificity of treatment. Similarly, there is a need to improve the personalisation of radiotherapy protocols, obtaining feedback about the patient’s response to the initial and subsequent fractions of radiotherapy, to ultimately revise radiotherapy doses according to the individual person’s response.
Development of a dual use device - able to identify VOCs indicative of chemical or radiation weapon exposure in the event of an attack as well as toxic alcohol or pesticide poisoning in routine clinical use - would ensure the device’s ready availability in the extremely rare event of a terrorist attack. A device only ready for a chemical/radiological weapon attack would likely be lost and unused at the moment of need. Such a device would markedly improve the triage of patients exposed to chemical weapons or radiation. The clinical studies proposed here are the first steps in developing such a dual-use device.
Tools for detection, traceability, triage and individual monitoring of victims
