6. Conclusions and outlook

Biosensors whose sensitive elements are olfactory receptors could lead to high-performance, low-cost medical detection devices, enabling direct, quantitative measurement without markers. In particular, they could be used for early, non-invasive medical diagnosis. Targeted applications range from pathologies that are widespread in countries with limited resources and a lack of heavy equipment and technical support for diagnosis (tuberculosis), to cancers for which systematic screening is being introduced in developed countries (prostate cancer, lung cancer, etc.). For each application, the first step is to identify an odorant marker specific to this pathology, then to find the olfactory receptor(s) relevant to this odorant, and to integrate this sensitive element into a hybrid device enabling detection of the odorant marker, and hence diagnosis of the pathology. Olfactory biosensors are...