Invention Reference: 12/MED/495
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Exhaled breath has been long envisioned as an ideal translational biomarker for disease association; it is easy to obtain, safe and non-invasive. Compounds expelled from exhaled breath reflect the status of metabolic process of human body and could be regarded as a fingerprint of one’s health status. In the past, metabolites of interests such as acetone and isoprene and other smaller ones consisted of only a small portion of total exhaled gas (trace gases) and were difficult to quantify. The advance in technology recently has enabled quick and accurate identification and quantification of breath components through gas mass spectrometry. As many as 200 compounds in exhaled breath could be quantified in a minute or so using a technique such as selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS). Due to the difficulty in bridging engineering breakthrough and medical application, only a limited number of clinical studies have been conducted using mass spectrometry, though some previous studies have established certain degree of association for single gases to diabetes, kidney function, and lung cancer. However, it is clear that using single gases to perform clinical studies to determine their relationship to various diseases has a lot of limitations. Previous exhaled breath study concentrated on only one or two gases, and very few studies have used the full scan mass data in the analysis. In fact, we found that employing multiple biomarkers is crucial in making accurate inference of disease. We have developed tools that are essential to analyze the data, to select important variables from hundreds of compounds and then using them to predict disease status and to assess various medical conditions.
Advantages
Diagnostic test based on breath samples are non-invasive, fast and potentially inexpensive methods as compared to laboratory tests such as blood or urine tests for rapid diagnosis of diseases. |
