Sano Genetics Podcast with Billy Boyle
Published on: 6 Mar 2020
Dr Patrick Short from Sano Genetics was recently at the Owlstone Medical office, interviewing our CEO Billy Boyle for the latest Sano Genetics Podcast.
Billy shared the story behind Owlstone Medical, explaining our mission and vision and discussing the advantages of using non-invasive Breath Biopsy, including the impact of diagnosing disease at an early stage. You can listen to what inspired the journey of taking the technology first developed to detect toxic gases, explosives and industrial chemicals, to a hand-held device used to investigate molecules in breath.
Listen to the podcast now on:
Here is a snapshot of the interview:
Billy: “At the moment it’s all about research products and services. Ultimately to save lives and to save money you need to develop breath biopsy tests to pick up cancer [or respiratory dieases] sooner or get patients in the right therapies. For that you need to have biomarkers. So what we are trying to do at the moment is discover and validate biomarkers, and we do that two ways. One is we try to identify problems ourselves – we will fund clinical studies, like lung cancer for instance. But what we have also done is made the Breath Biopsy platform available to researchers, academic customers and clinitians, who understand the problem very well. You might have someone trying to find biomarkers in tuberculosis, other infectious disease, other cancers… There are other volatile organic compounds that could be used. The reality is that you don’t know until you go looking for them. So what we do is make the technology available to those partners so that they can conduct research, collect high quiality data, and that allows us to see what is the utility of breath chemicals across the range of different applications”
Dr Patrick Short: “It seems like that is the way you can have the biggest impact. You are not limited by your own and your team’s imagination – you do have a very bright bunch here. But if you open it up to the world then you will be continually surprised at how people actually apply the technology.”
