A breath test could diagnose pneumonia in minutes

With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. The idea is that a person would first breathe in nanoparticles that are specially designed to attach to these biomarkers, detaching from them only in the presence of specific enzymes that the body produces during an infection.