For breath diagnostics to become mainstream, engineers needed to build a device more like a Breathalyzer. To do that, scientists took their inspiration from mammalian olfactory systems. Our brains recognize an odor not by singling out a specific chemical but by analyzing patterns of how olfactory receptors are activated. To replicate that in a device, engineers built a machine that was filled with electrochemical sensor arrays, often coated with metal oxides.
Singapore-based Breathonix, spun out from the National University of Singapore by Zhunan Jia and her colleagues, has developed a device that relies on mass spectrometric analysis for much the same reasons as Hill and Davis. “A lot of molecules in the breath have very similar structures and chemical properties, and they can be viewed as having the same pattern on sensors,” Jia says.
Breathe Biomedical, based in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, uses a type of IR spectroscopy called cavity ring-down spectroscopy. The company got its start with a technology developed at the University of Alberta to analyze emissions and gas leaks in oil sands fields. Breath poses a similar problem. The company designed a tabletop device that can capture alveolar breath on sorbent tubes. The tubes are then analyzed using IR-CRDS at the company’s headquarters.
Kade France, chief technology officer at Sotech Health, says that an e-nose is ideal for this since the tests are detecting shifts in the ratio of VOCs produced by the body and not pinpointing a specific biomarker, so the devices’ ability to sense patterns is perfectly suited. Perhaps the biggest challenge for breath-based detectors has been in validating small studies in larger, more diverse populations. The innate variability of human breath is testing’s biggest strength and its Achilles’ heel.
To Boyle, what the field needs more than another nifty gizmo is some basic science work. Researchers still don’t have an idea of what can be found in ‘normal’ breath, and until they have that answer, any breath-based test is going to be fraught with uncertainty, he says. But money for such experiments is hard to come by, leading to clinical validation in groups of people that are too small.
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