Rethinking breath analysis: validating a streamlined approach to scalable testing

Breath-based biomarker discovery is rapidly transitioning from exploratory studies to large-scale clinical trials, increasing demands on analytical throughput, reproducibility, and long-term data quality. Traditional untargeted TD-GC-MS workflows struggle to scale as sample numbers grow and analysis periods extend, increasing the risk of drift, variability, and QC burden.  

Thermal desorption coupled with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (TD–GC-MS) remains the gold standard for breath analysis due to its sensitivity, robustness, and compatibility with remote sampling and long-term storage. The shift from discovery to targeted validation creates an opportunity to re evaluate long standing method constraints.

In collaboration, Owlstone Medical and Markes developed and evaluated a series of targeted workflow enhancements designed to increase throughput while maintaining rigorous data quality. Rather than simply adapting the discovery phase method, we revisited several long held assumptions in TD GC MS and explored where established practices could be adapted to gain efficiency without losing control.
Analytical cycle times were reduced by approximately 50% while maintaining performance, robustness, and traceability across the workflow, enabling scalable, clinically relevant breath-analysis workflows.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

• Understand the emerging role of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath as a non-invasive diagnostic.
• Discover how to push thermal desorption beyond standard cycle times through a jointly developed software update and operate the GC closer to its practical limits.
• Recognise how to keep data stable over extended study periods using embedded QC measures such as standardised sampling and handling.
• Learn how these evidence-based optimisations can be applied to reduce analysis time by 50% and assist the scale-up to high-throughput clinical use.

Choose a session

Tuesday 6th October

• Broadcast 1: 10am BST | 11am CEST | 1pm GST | 2:30pm IST | 5pm SGT/CST | 7pm AEST
• Broadcast 2: 9am PDT | 11am CDT | 12pm EDT | 5pm BST

Presenter: will be announced