New advances and applications in breath research #BBCon2022
Published on: 4 Nov 2022
The fifth annual Breath Biopsy Conference saw around 600 members of the global breath research community, from nearly 70 different countries, register to join us for two days of cutting-edge presentations on the state-of-the-art in breath research.
Attendees at this flagship event were able to contribute to discussions on the latest advances of breathomics, alongside talks from 18 distinguished speakers, 24 research posters, live Q&A sessions and an ‘Ask the Expert’ panel discussion.
After an exciting, and thought provoking two days of innovative research insights, we are happy to announce you can now watch or re-watch the #BBCon22 presentations on demand, at you convenience.
CATCH UP ON THE TALKS FROM #BBCON22
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The main sessions this year focused on the applications of breath analysis, and the recent advances in related technologies, alongside an insightful early careers session and a pair of fantastic talks from our plenary speakers, Dr Alex Weston (Mayo Clinic) and Professor Chris Brightling (University of Leicester). You can find out a little more about all of our speakers, and their presentations, in the full event programme. |
Selected conference highlights
Chris Brightling, our first plenary speaker, kicked off Day 1 with his insightful talk on breath testing’s progress towards the clinic and the barriers that remain to its wider adoption. Next, Wisenave Arulvasan and Ace Hatch, both from Owlstone Medical, revealed one of our most exciting recent internal projects – our new volatile organic compound (VOC) ATLAS, an ever-growing list of VOCs that exist on breath, differentiated from background contamination, and found repeatedly in a human population.
Day 1 also hosted our Early Careers session and Applications of Breath Analysis session, including talks on respiratory diseases from Waqar Ahmed, University of Manchester and Anke-Hilse Maitland-Van der Zee, University of Amsterdam. One of the most engaged with presentations of the conference was presented by Sarah Bloor & Charlotte Pitcher of Functional Gut Diagnostics, on using hydrogen and methane breath testing (HMBT) to monitor the microbiome. Breath testing for the microbiome will be the subject of our webinar in early 2023.
On Day 2 Alexandra Martin shared some of our recent work targeting lung cancer tumors in vitro with exogenous volatile organic compound (EVOC) Probes before the Advances in Technologies in Breath analysis featured presentations from Stamatios Giannoukos of ETH Zürich, Frederik-Jan van Schooten of Maastricht University, Y Lan Pham of the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering & Packaging IVV and Pierre-Hugues Stefanuto of the University of Liège.
In the afternoon Alex Weston of the Mayo Clinic gave our second plenary speech on his work using machine learning to predict the presence of cirrhosis based on volatolomic profiling of patient breath samples, before Day 2 was rounded out by our ‘Ask the Experts’ panel discussion. Always a popular feature at BBCon, this year’s panel discussion was no different. We were indebted to the lively and interactive debate that was led by our panellists Salman Siddiqui, Clinical Professor of Respiratory Medicine at Imperial College, Renelle Myers, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Terence Risby, Emeritus Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Olaf Holz of the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine and Stephen Fowler, Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester, and the chair Billy Boyle, Owlstone Medical’s CEO. This year’s theme was ‘the biggest unanswered questions in breath research’ and benefitted from the addition of some excellent audience contributions.
The poster session continues to grow in popularity, with a record number of 24 posters submitted this year. The conference’s two poster sessions saw presentations from across the globe with, for the first time, two winners announced of the annual poster prize. Congratulations to Wout Duthoo, from imec, and Brett Hoskins, from Johns Hopkins University, for their posters, both of which were around the theme of point-of-care testing. All posters are now live on the Community page, where you can interact, ask questions and more.
Thank you to our attendees and sponsors
We are extremely grateful to everyone that attended and supported this year’s Breath Biopsy Conference. We would especially like to thank our sponsors Element, Markes International, Sepsolve and Thermo Fisher Scientific, for their participation in the event. These organizations’ expertise is integral to the future success of breath research, so it was fantastic to welcome them to the conference and hear about some of their latest work.
You are invited to the Breath Biopsy Conference 2023
Next year’s BBCon will be held on 31st October and 1st November. Make sure you register your interest to get further details as they become available.
