Owlstone Medical launches Breath Biopsy Kits

Commercially available research kits extend access to Breath Biopsy technology for discovery of VOC biomarkers in early disease detection and precision medicine

Cambridge, UK, March 28, 2018: Owlstone Medical, a diagnostics company developing a breathalyzer for disease, today announced the launch of its Breath Biopsy® Kits, based on the company’s proprietary Breath Biopsy platform. The new product range allows academic, clinical and pharmaceutical researchers to quickly discover and validate breath-based biomarkers in early detection and precision medicine research activities.

Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy platform is a new diagnostic modality capable of detecting biomarkers of disease, and also exogenous compounds such as volatile drug metabolites, in breath. The company’s ReCIVA Breath Sampler and new Breath Biopsy Kits ensure consistent and reliable collection of breath samples. VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) biomarkers present in breath can be analyzed with high sensitivity and selectivity in Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory, or in a researcher’s own laboratory.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said: “Our goal is to help realize the potential of breath biopsy and make it accessible to the widest research base. By launching kits we are making the process of collecting and analyzing a sample of breath as straightforward as possible and ensuring high quality and reproducible results. We want to help researchers to be successful as this will, in turn, lead to more breath biopsy tests being developed and further establish breath biopsy as a new industry category across of broad range of applications in early disease detection and precision medicine.”

Availability of Breath Biopsy Kits makes breath biopsy widely accessible to clinical researchers and pharma companies including those without ‘in house’ analytical capability for breath samples and without being required to purchase high cost capital equipment. Breath Biopsy Kits are available to cover the entire process from discovery to validation of VOC biomarkers:

• Breath Biopsy Collection Kits enable researchers to collect reliable breath samples that can then be analyzed in their own laboratory using instrumentation such as the Lonestar VOC Analyzer from Owlstone Medical.
• Breath Biopsy Discovery VOC Kits include the consumables required for breath collection, as well as a comprehensive breath VOC analysis performed in Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory to enable broad discovery of VOC biomarkers in breath.
• Breath Biopsy Target VOC Kits include the consumables required for breath collection, as well as a targeted analysis of specific VOC biomarkers by Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services to enable validation of biomarker classifiers.

The Breath Biopsy Kits contain high quality consumables for use with the ReCIVA Breath Sampler: including a Breath Biopsy Cartridge to collect, stabilize and enrich VOCs in breath, enhancing the sensitivity for detection of VOCs, and a disposable Breath Biopsy Mask. All kit components are manufactured and quality checked to the exacting standards required for the analysis of VOC biomarkers in breath. ReCIVA Breath Samplers are available for purchase or to lease.

By choosing to send samples to Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory for analysis, scientists can benefit from the world’s largest Breath Biopsy digital biobank, to further explore biomarker classifiers and gain valuable insights into potential performance in larger patient populations.

Dr. Stephen Fowler, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester said: "The European asthma research innovation partnership (EARIP) recently highlighted the potential of VOCs to assist phenotyping asthma and predicting major clinical outcomes such as exacerbations and response to treatment. Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Discovery VOC Kits could help overcome a major road block for the large scale studies that are required to get breath into clinical practice by facilitating standardization of both sampling and analytical methods."

Professor Chris Mayhew, Director of the Institute for Breath Research at the University of Innsbruck, commented: “The ability to run targeted analysis of specific VOCs of interest and to have access to large patient populations via the Breath Biopsy digital biobank will enable us to greatly speed up the process of validating the VOC biomarkers we have identified in our previous studies.”

To find out more about Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Kits, visit:
www.owlstonemedical.com/products/breath-biopsy-kits/

ENDS

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About Owlstone Medical Ltd

Owlstone Medical has developed a unique breathalyzer for disease. The company’s vision is to become the global leader in non-invasive breath tests for early disease detection and precision medicine across cancer, inflammatory disease and infectious disease with the aim of saving 100,000 lives and $1.5 billion in healthcare costs.

Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy® platform is creating a new industry category, based on the routine detection and analysis of volatile organic compound (VOC) biomarkers in breath, which has the potential to revolutionize healthcare. The award winning ReCIVA Breath Sampler is the first standardized breath collection device designed to capture the VOC biomarkers present in breath, which are then analyzed using Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy services and products.

Owlstone Medical is developing breath tests for the early detection of lung and colorectal cancer. These are two of the most common cancer killers worldwide and represent multibillion dollar market opportunities. The company has an active clinical diagnostics/screening pipeline including the world’s largest breath-based clinical trials. The Breath Biopsy platform is also being deployed in the PAN cancer trial, a collaboration with Cancer Research UK studying the early detection of eight different cancer types in breath.

The company also sees a significant role for Breath Biopsy in precision medicine, where it can provide dynamic information about a patient’s disease activity and identify patients most likely to respond to a particular therapy. Breath Biopsy aims to ensure that the right therapy is given to the right patient at the right time, helping to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.

Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy clinical laboratory is a unique, revenue generating capability that allows pharmaceutical, clinical and academic partners worldwide to explore breath-based biomarkers to optimize their own precision medicine activities. The commercialization of Breath Biopsy precision medicine companion diagnostics through pharmaceutical partners is expected to provide Owlstone Medical with a significant royalty stream as breath-based precision medicine becomes a reality.

Owlstone Medical was spun out of Owlstone Inc. in 2016 to develop and commercialize medical applications of its proprietary microchip chemical sensing technology, Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometry (FAIMS), which is sold in the military and industrial sectors globally. The company has raised a total of $38.5 million in equity financing, and is backed by technology investor Horizons Ventures, and Aviva, a leading healthcare insurer.

Owlstone Medical is headquartered in Cambridge, UK.