Research Products and Services

Supporting Your Research

Exhaled breath contains a range of volatile metabolites that originate from tissues around the body, that have been carried to the lungs via the circulatory system. These volatile organic compounds, or “VOCs”, can originate from a range of physiological processes, or from exogenous/external sources. As such, these volatile metabolites in breath can be used as biomarkers for a wide range of purposes, from fundamental research to clinical trials, and in the clinic for diagnostic, monitoring, and screening purposes. Unique signatures of the levels of different breath metabolites have been associated with different biological contexts, including respiratory conditions, liver diseases, cancers, the microbiome, and environmental exposures.

Discover more examples in our publications and case studies sections. Alternatively, read our comprehensive Breath Biopsy Guide for a complete reference document for breath biomarkers and their potential in the clinic.

Breath Biopsy Overview

Owlstone Medical offers a range of volatile metabolomic products and services to support biomarker collection and analysis from both exhaled breath and in vitro samples. We can help you wherever you are in your research journey, from the early stages to discover and characterize breath metabolites in your area of interest, to the later stages to develop and deploy breath tests to translate validated breath biomarkers into the clinic.

Breath Biopsy – Sample Collection

The Breath Biopsy Collection Station has been designed and optimized to ensure a high-quality, reproducible collection of breath samples. The heart of our system is the ReCIVA^® Breath Sampler, which can simultaneously collect and pre-concentrate duplicate breath samples, helping to ensure robust results. Together with the background-reducing capabilities of the CASPER^® Portable Air Supply, our system offers a high signal-to-noise ratio optimized for quality breath biomarker discovery, minimizing the chance of false discovery and avoiding missing biologically important, low abundance markers.

We also provide in vitro volatile compound collection and analysis capabilities to take advantage of the experimental conditions offered by in vitro models for deeper mechanistic information about certain biomarkers or to support and give confidence to in vivo exhaled breath data. Our systems can collect volatile compounds emitted from the headspace of tissues, cell cultures, and isolated macromolecular preparations for direct analysis.

Breath Biopsy – Sample Analysis

If you would like your breath samples to be processed and analyzed by our specialists using processes optimized through years of experience with breath, we can process breath samples collected with the Breath Biopsy Collection Station in our Breath Biopsy Laboratory in Cambridge, UK.

The Breath Biopsy^® OMNI^® service delivers comprehensive and robust identification and analysis of volatile compounds in exhaled breath, encompassing expertise in study design, optimized sample collection, high-confidence identification of compounds against reference libraries, analysis, and biological interpretation of your data.

OMNI is the only commercially available tool optimized to reproducibly detect and confidently identify biologically relevant compounds in exhaled breath through a combination of robust sample collection and advanced HRAM GC-MS technology for sample analysis. Our expert team of analytical chemists, data scientists, and translational biologists apply a rigorous quality control process to provide you with accurate and reliable results and can assist you with biological interpretation, statistical analysis, and even study design to ensure that your data is of the highest possible quality.

Our OMNI service includes access to our Breath Biopsy^® VOC Atlas, a catalog of identified compounds that are commonly found on breath within a heterogeneous population. Using background samples, we have carefully distinguished breath-associated compounds from environmental contaminants and quantified the concentration ranges for these commonly found on-breath volatile compounds. This quantitation of known breath compounds can provide a valuable reference data set to support our customer’s studies of breath biomarkers in different populations and provide a greater understanding of biological pathways, as well as open the potential for more targeted study designs.

Should you prefer, we can also provide you with the technology to implement your own mass spectrometry or FAIMS analysis pipelines to analyze Breath Biopsy samples in your own facility. Contact our team to find out more.

Integrate Breath Biopsy into your Clinical Trial