Stephen Fowler at the 2020 Breath Biopsy Conference
VOC Applications session (25 min) - Breath analysis - not (only) for diagnosis
The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference:
Talk Abstract:
The breath comprises thousands of exhaled VOCs arising from the environment and the host. The complexity of the sample is associated with significant inter-individual variability which is likely to mask disease-specific changes unless the sampled population is huge. Further, many diseases are defined not by specific metabolic derangements but by high-level features such as symptoms and physiology. For such diseases the search for clinically useful breath biomarker that can be exploited to identify or exclude disease may be long and costly. There are however many other applications for biomarkers, such as disease-phenotyping, treatment-stratification and monitoring, for which breath biomarkers may well be more suitable and discoverable. In this talk I will discuss potential applications of breath analysis in this light, with a focus on study design and interpretation.
Speaker Biography:
Stephen Fowler is a Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester and Honorary Consultant Respiratory Physician at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. His clinical and research interests lie in the diagnosis, classification and management of airways disease, principally asthma and associated conditions such as inducible laryngeal obstruction and breathing pattern disorders. He is investigating novel non-invasive biomarkers for phenotyping inflammatory and infectious lung disease, through the detection and analysis of volatile molecules in exhaled breath.
The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference: