James Logan at the 2020 Breath Biopsy Conference

The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference:

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Talk Abstract:
Dogs are some of nature’s greatest detectives, owing to their incredible sense of smell and ability to be trained. Most of us will be familiar with seeing trained sniffer dogs at airports looking for drugs and other prohibited items, but could they also play a crucial role in fighting the global coronavirus pandemic? It is well documented that many diseases and respiratory illnesses can alter the way we smell – and we know that dogs are fully capable of detecting these odours. Research that we published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in 2019 showed that medical detection dogs are able to accurately diagnose malaria by smell alone with high accuracy. Importantly, the dogs can detect this in individuals who have no symptoms. Here, we will present our latest research led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University, to investigate whether dogs can be trained to identify the odours associated with COVID-19 infection.

Here, we present a brief history of how this field has developed, particularly in the last 10-20 years, with a particular emphasis on the importance of how the use of GCxGC, TOF-MS and HR-TOF-MS are being used to generate higher quality data sets, giving increased accuracy and confidence in analyte identifications and therefore the overall diagnostic results obtained.

Speaker Biography:

Professor James Logan is the Head of the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Director of ARCTEC. He is the co-founder of the first spin out company from the London School, Vecotech Ltd, an IP driven company; and is launching a second company, ARCTEC, a contract research company, which he also founded in 2011.

Academically, James leads a large, international research portfolio, investigating new ways to detect and control diseases, including COVID-19, malaria, Zika, dengue, trachoma and Lyme disease. His work also aims to identify and understand chemical signals given off by the human body during infection and use these as biomarkers of diseases for the development of non-invasive diagnostics. Recently, his team identified volatile biomarkers of malaria and demonstrated that dogs can be trained to detect malaria with high accuracy.

Most recently, James is leading a study, with funding from the UK government, to investigate novel, non-invasive diagnostics for COVID-19 based on volatile biomarkers, and to determine whether dogs can be trained to diagnose COVID-19 infection in humans.

James regularly advises the UK government and other international organisations on aspects of disease control. Additionally, he presents a wide variety of science television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4.

The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference:

Express Interest