Owlstone Medical Expands U.S. Operations and Establishes Permanent U.S. Office
Published on: 11 Dec 2020, under Company Updates
- Office provides enhanced high quality local support for U.S. pharmaceutical and academic customers
Cambridge, UK, and Research Triangle Park, NC, U.S., December 11 2020: Owlstone Medical, the global leader in Breath Biopsy® for applications in early disease detection and precision medicine, today announces that it has taken important steps to better support its pharmaceutical and academic customers in the United States by establishing a permanent office and expanding its highly skilled local team.
Owlstone Medical’s vision is to save 100,000 lives by realizing the enormous healthcare and economic promise of breath-based diagnostics through the development and application of Breath Biopsy. The key challenges we are working to address are the early detection of disease, including cancer and liver disease, which can have a profound impact on long-term survival rates; and precision medicine in areas such as asthma and COPD, where we seek to better understand the progression of disease between individuals and to predict which patients will respond to which therapeutics.
To realize this opportunity, the business is focused on providing high value Breath Biopsy Products and Services to pharmaceutical and academic clients, and developing Tests in multi-billion dollar areas of major clinical need.
Owlstone Medical has built a world-class U.S. business development team to help drive this effort, which is now further aided by the opening of a permanent office in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This office, close to a major global hub of pharmaceutical research, will enable us to support our customers more effectively in local time zones.
At this facility we have established a team of accomplished translational and clinical scientists with vast experience in metabolomics, biochemistry, and the biology that underpins disease. This group will serve as liaisons to local customers, addressing technical inquiries, offering expert guidance on clinical study design, providing professional report generation, and presenting biological interpretation of study results. Further, this group will enable deepening of existing U.S. pharmaceutical and academic partnerships, along with expanding uptake of Owlstone Medical’s services by driving awareness of Breath Biopsy and the value of breath profiling.
Huw Davies, VP of Global Sales at Owlstone Medical, said: “Owlstone Medical’s Research Products and Services are offered through a transparent and efficient process which has been refined over time through our experience working with academic, clinical, and pharmaceutical partners from around the world. With the opening of our U.S. office, we are excited to be able to offer enhanced local support as we work with our customers to discover and deploy reliable and clinically relevant biomarkers on breath.”
Dr Robert Mohney, Head of Clinical and Translational Science at Owlstone Medical from our U.S. office presented ‘Discovery and Clinical Investigation of Non-Invasive Biomarkers using Breath Biopsy®‘.
We’re hiring in both our Cambridge and U.S. offices.
ENDS
Notes to Editors:
For more information please contact:
Sarah Jeffery, Zyme Communications
sarah.jeffery@zymecommunications.com
+44 (0) 7771-730919
About Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Products and Services and OMNI Assay:
Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Products and Services provide a complete solution for the collection, analysis and discovery of VOC biomarkers in exhaled breath. The Breath Biopsy OMNI Assay is our comprehensive solution for end-to-end breath sample collection and VOC biomarker analysis. The implementation of our ever-expanding High Resolution Accurate Mass Breath Biopsy Library ensures high confidence in VOC biomarker identifications. The internal standards and quality controls that we have put in place allow accurate relative quantitation for all identified breath compounds. We also offer a number of analysis and reporting options available ranging from raw feature tables through to comprehensive statistical analysis including univariate and multivariate analysis methods and biological interpretation for mechanistic understanding.
What is Breath Biopsy®?
Breath Biopsy represents an entirely new way to determine the chemical makeup of breath by measuring volatile organic compounds (VOCs), gaseous molecules that can be sampled quickly and non-invasively. VOCs originate from all parts of the body as the end product of metabolic processes, making Breath Biopsy applicable to a wide range of diseases including cancer, liver disease, and respiratory disease. Breath also contains microscopic aerosol particles from the lungs and airways, which can contain a wide range of biomarkers including for infectious disease. The nature of Breath Biopsy therefore makes it perfectly suited to addressing two of the major challenges of healthcare today: early detection of disease and precision medicine.
Breath collection is carried out using Owlstone Medical’s ReCIVA® Breath Sampler, which ensures reliable, reproducible collection of VOCs. Samples of exhaled breath are captured and stabilized on Breath Biopsy Cartridges, which can then be shipped to Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy lab for analysis, using Thermo Fisher Scientific Orbitrap™ Mass Spectrometry or FAIMS to determine their VOC profile. Advanced data analytic techniques can then be applied in order to pinpoint the VOCs of interest.
About Owlstone Medical (www.owlstonemedical.com):
Owlstone Medical’s vision is to save 100,000 lives by realizing the enormous promise of breath-based diagnostics through the development and application of Breath Biopsy®. The Breath Biopsy platform includes ReCIVA®, a proprietary sample collection device that can take stable breath samples anywhere, the world’s only commercial Breath Biopsy Laboratory located in Cambridge, U.K. with support through our office in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA, and the development of the world’s largest Digital Breath Biobank matched to patient phenotype.
Owlstone Medical is deploying the platform to address some of the key challenges of 21st century healthcare. The focus is on the development of Tests and RUO Panels for the early detection of disease with an emphasis on cancer, and on precision medicine with an emphasis on liver and respiratory disease. The Breath Biopsy OMNI (Owlstone Medical Novel Insights) Assay is Owlstone Medical’s comprehensive solution for end-to-end breath sample collection and VOC analysis, which is being deployed with large pharma including AstraZeneca, Actelion Pharmaceuticals (a J&J company), and GlaxoSmithKline, and leading academic institutions. Owlstone Medical’s technology is currently in use at over 100 sites worldwide.