Monell news article: smell of skin cancer

At the American Chemical Society's annual conference , researchers from the Monell Center announced results from a study on the 'smell of skin cancers', using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry techniques to look for volatile organic compound patterns over skin.

This is relevant to bloodborne body odor in that someday the same type of testing will probably be used for diagnosis of bloodborne body odors, since they are testing for odorous volatile organic compounds. The technology and expertise seems to be available, but currently no researcher seems interested in bloodborne odors like fecal body odor, despite it seeming to be the most common type of bloodborne body odor.

Human skin produces numerous airborne chemical molecules known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, many of which are odorous.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7573060.stm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080820162842.htm

Here is the full press release from the Monell site (in PDF format)
http://www.monell.org/files/news/skincancerpr.pdf

other links:
http://www.monell.org/news_h.htm

Their pubmed paper released last month which tested the VOC pattern in normal skin
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18637798