Story highlights Researches know that dogs and cats can sometimes detect diseases with their keen sense of smell

Owlstone has created a microchip that can detect chemical molecules in the air with great accuracy

Eventually the company wants to enter the healthcare space with a breathalyzer that could detect diseases

Its 'digital nose' can already detect down to parts per billion, equivalent to one drop in an Olympic swimming pool

(CNN) It's long been known that dogs and cats, with their highly developed sense of smell, can be trained to identify the volatile chemicals released by human illnesses.

In some cases, researchers have even trained household pets to detect cancer or predict epileptic seizures

But what if we could fine tune that sense and put it into a microchip, allowing us to create a breathalyzer for diseases?

For Dr. Andrew Koehl, the inventor of the microchip spectrometer technology at the heart of this "digital nose", the technology that will allow us to do just that is already here.

"We can detect down to parts per billion levels," Koehl says. "To give you an analogy that's equivalent to one drop in an Olympic size swimming pool."

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