Owlstone Medical partners with Thermo Fisher Scientific for breath biopsies

Owlstone Medical last week announced that it has forged a partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific‘s (NYSE:TMO) to advance non-invasive breath sampling in disease detection.

Through the agreement, both companies will integrate the Thermo Scientific Q Exactive GC Hybrid Quadrupole-Orbitrap MassSpectrometer into Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy platform. The collaboration will hopefully qualify the mass analyzer for detecting biomarkers to become a part of Owlstone Medical’s biomarker discovery process.

“There is clearly a growing need for non-invasive diagnostic solutions to support the early detection of disease,” senior director of marketing, chromatography and mass spectrometry at Thermo Fisher Scientific Morten Bern said in a news release. “The integration of our Orbitrap GC-MS technology with Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy platform provides a unique basis to improve patient outcomes through the discovery of breath biomarkers and their incorporation into clinical practice.”

The Breath Biopsy system is designed to measure the chemical makeup of breath by measuring volatile organic compounds that can be sampled non-invasively to enable whole-body sampling, according to Owlstone Medical.

“The GC Orbitrap platform’s ability to detect a wide range of chemicals during both targeted and untargeted analyses without losing selectivity or sensitivity, promises to be of substantial benefit to our Breath Biopsy platform,” co-founder and CEO of Owlstone Medical Billy Boyle said. “With a large and rapidly expanding installed base of GC Orbitrap systems, our partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific represents an exciting opportunity for cross-promotion of the platform and technique, by which the benefits of Breath Biopsy can be broadly realized.”