Agi Smolinska at the 2020 Breath Biopsy Conference
VOC Applications session (30 min) - Exhaled breath as early predictive signatures of asthma in children
The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference:
Talk Abstract:
Biomarker discovery has become a significant area in medical and biomedical research areas during the past decades. The primary focus is to deliver diagnostic tools for accurate assessment when a healthy state becomes dysfunctional at the earliest stage possible. The conjunction of advanced spectroscopy with multivariate analysis allows the detailed breakdown of the molecular composition of biofluids such as exhaled breath. One of the most common respiratory symptoms in preschool children under six years old is wheezing. Currently, there are no reliable tests available that predict at early age whether child will develop asthma. Asthma diagnosis tests can be reliably made in adults but the same tests are difficult to use in children, because they are invasive and require active cooperation of the patient. Therefore, a non-invasive alternative is necessary for children. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) excreted in exhaled breath could yield such non-invasive and patient-friendly diagnostic. In this study we have been investigated the utility of exhaled breath volatile metabolites to predict the probability of asthma in preschool children. For that purpose, first exhaled breath of 250 preschool children was collected and analyzed by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to find early predictive markers of asthma. The set of potential VOCs in exhaled breath led to the discrimination between asthmatic and transient wheezer preschool children with prediction power of 75% (using internal test set). To further exploit the power of the VOCs in exhaled breath we conducted a second independent study where a group of 40 asthmatic and wheezer children was recruited and exhaled breath collected. In the second study, exhaled breath was measured by GC-MS as well by selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) in full scan mode. We will demonstrate whether predictive power of exhaled breath metabolites found in the first study can be replicated in the independent cohort. Secondly, we will exhibit that the prediction accuracy of asthma in children might be improved by joined statistical analysis of VOCs in breath by GC-MS and SIFT-MS in full scan mode.
Agnieszka Smolinska1, Raffaele Vitale2, Sophie Kienhorst3, Edward Dompeling3, Frederik-Jan van Schooten1
1. School of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism (NUTRIM), Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, The Netherlands
2. Laboratoire de Spectrochimie Infrarouge et Raman – LASIR CNRS – UMR 8516, Université de Lille, Bâtiment C5, F-59000, Lille, France
3. Department of Pediatric Pulmonology, School for Public Health and Primary Care (CAPHRI), Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC), Maastricht, The Netherlands
Speaker Biography:
Agnieszka (Agi) Smolinska studied chemistry at Silesian University in Katowice, Poland. In 2008 she moved to the Netherlands to perform her doctoral study at Radboud University in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). During her PhD she worked in metabolomics filed, where she combined nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with advanced machine learning technique in biomarker discovery of neurological disorders, mainly multiple sclerosis. She obtained her PhD degree in 2012.
Since her PhD, she has been working as a postdoc at Maastricht University, The Netherlands and Dartmouth University in USA. Her current research group (in Maastricht) is focused on the multiple applications (for lung diseases, chronic liver diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, and irritable bowel syndrome) of volatile metabolites in exhaled air and other biofluids and finding their relation to the gut microbiome using machine learning/multivariate statistics. Since 2020 she has been working and collaborating with Owlstone Medical to further develop exhaled breath research for medical applications.
Agi has received various awards and grants (best PhD thesis, metabolomics young scientist, Veni NWO, Niels Stensen fellowship, Transcan-2, Nutrim seeding grant), and has authored more than 49 publications.
The 2021 Breath Biopsy Conference is scheduled for 12th & 13th October. Click the button to express interest in the next Breath Biopsy Conference: