Dr. Kavita M. Jeerage, NIST at BBCon 2024
Potential Uses of Breath Surrogates for the Development and Deployment of New Infectious Disease Breathalyzers
00:00 Introduction
00:16 Presentation ‘Potential Uses of Breath Surrogates for the Development and Deployment of New Infectious Disease Breathalyzers’
26:00 Question and answer session
Talk Abstract:
Malaria and tuberculosis, two infectious diseases that cause tremendous loss of life, are most reliably diagnosed via slow and/or expensive methods, such as microscopic examination of blood smears or cultured sputum samples, or by nucleic acids. Non-invasive identification via inexpensive sensors that target volatile organic compound (VOC) signatures in breath would provide an important point-of-care improvement. Sensors under development for this purpose can be benchmarked and eventually validated through the delivery of reproducible, matrix-matched breath surrogates. Such surrogates must contain compounds relevant to the disease(s) in question, at relevant concentrations, and must also mimic other relevant characteristics of human breath (e.g., temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and oxygen content), and perhaps potential interferents that may be found in the breath of patients without the disease. This presentation briefly summarizes potential VOCs of interest for the diagnosis of malaria and tuberculosis as identified through published studies of in vitro cultures, in vivo animal models, and humans exposed to these diseases (naturally or in controlled settings). This presentation also discusses existing approaches to delivering matrix-matched breath surrogates, and the system under development in our labs, which utilizes standard gas mixtures prepared in nitrogen. Approaches to address stability challenges in the cylinder or in the delivery system are discussed. In combination with the delivery system, standard gas mixtures will permit prototype devices to be evaluated in a controlled laboratory setting with known uncertainty for each component of the matrix-matched surrogate. Jeerage KM (1)*, Cecelski CE (2), Lovestead TM (1), Carney J (2), Urness KN (1), Murray JA (2), Widegren JA (1) (1) Applied Chemicals and Materials Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colorado, USA 80305 (2) Chemical Sciences Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA 20899
Speaker Biography:
Dr. Kavita M. Jeerage, PhD, leads efforts to develop and deploy standards for breath analysis, including both clinical analysis and forensic analysis, focused on cannabis breathalyzers. Dr. Jeerage received degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington, and joined NIST in 2006 through a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has a broad background in instrumental analysis, electrochemical sensors and actuators, material-fluid interactions, and in vitro toxicology. Starting in 2020, Dr. Jeerage led the expansion of NIST’s cannabis breathalyzer program into human studies and began creating NIST’s clinical breath standards program. She is currently the principal investigator of two ongoing human studies that examine breath matrices for cannabis compounds and the feasibility of a two timepoint breath test to determine recent cannabis use. She is also leading an effort to develop breath surrogates to benchmark breathalyzers for infectious disease. Dr. Jeerage has partnered with researchers in public health and psychology to accomplish the goals of these programs and leads teams that include chemists, physicists, engineers, statisticians, theorists, and experimentalists.
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