Developing breath testing for the clinical environment

In the early stages oesophago-gastric cancer has symptoms like many other illnesses, so determining whether a patient has this disease can be a challenge. Normally, patients undergo an invasive, time-consuming and costly endoscopy. Therefore, there is a need to develop a simple, quick and non-invasive test to select only those patients at risk of developing the cancer to be sent for an endoscopy.

Several clinical trials have shown that volatiles in exhaled breath can be used to identify patients with cancer. Biomarker identification and validation are key in the development of robust diagnostic models that reproducibly classify cancer patients.

This study aims to develop a reliable method using thermal desorption (TD) coupled with GC×GC-TOF MS/FID and Fast GC-TOF MS to discover new predictive biomarkers for oesophago-gastric cancer.

The guest speaker is Professor George Hanna (Imperial College London), who will discuss the challenges involved in developing methods for clinical use, and demonstrate the application of these modern separation and detection technologies for the profiling volatiles from biological samples.

Presenter: Prof. George Hanna (Head of Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London

Professor Hanna’s clinical work is based at Imperial College NHS Trust and includes oesophageal and gastric cancer and advanced laparoscopic surgery. The current interests of his laboratory revolve around volatile organic compounds analysis for biomarker discovery and understanding the molecular drivers of volatile compounds in order to develop non-invasive breath test to diagnose gastrointestinal cancers.