György Horvath, the founder of VOC Diagnostics initiated research on Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) based on their reported usefulness in cancer diagnosis. Three initial studies were conducted with two specially trained dogs. The studies were published internationally during 2008-2013 and showed the following:

• Human ovarian cancer is surrounded by a specific odor (VOC) that is organ-specific
• VOCs from ovarian cancer can be distinguished from VOCs that occur around normal ovarian tissue as well as other forms of cancer
• These specific VOCs occur in relatively high concentration in the patient's blood
• Characteristic VOCs are present in the bloodstreams of patients with semi-malignant so-called borderline tumors, as well as early stages of invasive cancer
• VOC-based diagnostics are superior to other methods used in healthcare

Further studies showed that eleven specific VOCs were found to be associated and characteristic to ovarian cancer. The prototype instrument’s algorithm was trained on a large number of cancer and control samples. In 2015 a new study was launched including 165 samples, where 97 of them were ovarian cancer samples and 68 were controls from healthy individuals. The very promising results of 92% sensitivity and 93% specificity were published in the Journal of Cancer Science & Therapy. Based on the promising findings a first prototype of an electric nose was built. The idea was to develop an instrument that could diagnose cancer through the detection of VOCs.