Allowing individuals to identify and monitor specific biomarkers of disease in their own breath is one of the anticipated benefits of personalized medicine. Dr. Pelagia Irene Gouma was the keynote speaker and her research group is expected to drive the first products of portable diagnostic breathalyzers. She focused on three issues in doing so:
- the sensor’s ability to identify, discriminate, and measure accurately the concentration of the specific metabolite/analyte (such as nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia, acetone, isoprene, benzene, ethane, pentane) in a small volume, complex gas mixture of a single exhalation;
- the sensor’s ability to respond fast to the stimulus and to recover fast from it in order to be able to repeat the measurement reproducibly and reliably; and
- published guidelines from the medical community for interpreting exhaled gas level.
The first requirement raises the issues of specificity/selectivity to the analyte of interest and sensitivity limits with respect to the lowest detection threshold and the resolution of the response/output signal, which must be measured in the minute concentrations of the important biomarkers in breath (low ppm, ppb, ppt levels). Her group pioneered ceramic nanotechnology based breathalyzers pioneered, relying on a crystallo-chemical approach that relates oxide-gas interactions to the structural features to the analyte of interest as opposed to the composition of the oxide gas sensing element.