An Israeli Breath Test Wins Top Prize at the World's Biggest Med-Tech Fair

The Israeli medical technology startup Nanose Medical has won first place in both the jury and audience votes at the Healthcare Innovation World Cup, held as part of Germany's MEDICA exhibition, the world's largest medical technology event.

The company was founded five years ago in collaboration with the Technion, Israel's institute of technology in Haifa, and Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. It develops DiaNose, an AI-driven device that analyses biomarkers in a patient's breath to detect diseases including lung cancer and advanced liver fibrosis. It is supported by the Israel Innovation Authority, the European Union and Google, and is running clinical trials in Israel and Europe. Co-founder Ilay Marom called the double victory "extraordinary validation" of the technology, stressing its potential to save lives through early, non-invasive diagnosis.

How a breath test can look for cancer

Human breath carries hundreds of volatile organic compounds, and the mix shifts when tissue is diseased. The difficulty has always been reading the pattern rather than any single molecule.

Calcalist, profiling the company in June 2025, described its approach as inspired by the human sense of smell: rather than isolating individual molecules, the system identifies patterns across the whole sample, in the way a nose recognises a scent. The technology draws on more than a decade of research at the Technion led by Professor Hossam Haick, who is a partner in the company. The same report said the company was targeting lung cancer and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, a condition for which, it noted, there is no available screening tool, and put total funding at $10.5 million: $6.5 million in equity and roughly $4 million in non-dilutive grants from the EU's Horizon Europe and European Innovation Council programmes, the Israel Innovation Authority and Google.

What MEDICA is

MEDICA is held annually in Düsseldorf and is the reference event for the global medical device trade. Medical Laboratory Observer, reporting on the 2025 edition in November, put attendance at more than 5,300 exhibitors from 70 countries, and confirmed the Healthcare Innovation World Cup went to "the Nanose Medical team from Israel with their compact device for real-time digital analysis of breath samples for the diagnosis of lung cancer or advanced liver disease".

The competition's own organisers list the company as a first-place winner and describe the product as a table-top device that digitises and analyses breath samples in real time.

Where Israeli health technology sits

Health technology was the busiest corner of Israeli startup fundraising last year by deal count. Globes, reporting Startup Nation Central's December 2025 annual figures, recorded 152 healthtech funding rounds (more than any other sector) within a national total of $15.6 billion raised across 717 rounds, the fewest rounds in a decade.

What is still unclear

The announcement did not say how far the clinical trials have progressed, in how many patients, or with what accuracy the device has performed. It gave no regulatory timetable in Israel, Europe or the United States, and no indication of price or of when the device might reach clinics.