2023 - A Recap with CEO Billy Boyle.

With a new year on the horizon, we asked Owlstone Medical CEO, Billy Boyle, a few questions to get his opinion on Owlstone Medical’s work and the breath research field as a whole during 2023.

Could you start by providing an overview of the current state of the breath diagnostics industry as of 2023? 

Certainly! It’s been great to see an increasing variety in the disease areas and numbers of studies where breath research is being used to provide valuable insight into disease mechanisms, highlighting the potential for non-invasive diagnostics for early detection. 

I think this year’s Breath Biopsy Conference provides a consolidated overview of this, with research spanning not only the respiratory space with lung cancer, asthma, and ILD, but also the gut microbiome, liver disease, and diabetes amongst others, and importantly the continued development of the technology and methods that underlie breath research.

The push for standardization has been of specific focus within the field for us and is a key thing to get right for breath research to progress and become more widely adopted. A broad range of promising approaches in breath analysis have been deployed both on the sampling side of things right through to the analytical techniques. The question is, should we standardize the analytical hardware platforms, or should we develop a best practice of breath collection to be used across the different hardware? During the conference we discussed this and concluded that standardizing procedures and processes was more beneficial. 

The ongoing refinement of Breath Biopsy® OMNI®, building of the VOC Atlas to establish a baseline of normal human breath, and developing other innovative methodologies to deal with research needs, such as sampling intubated mice, has been Owlstone’s answer to trying to address standardization and we will continue working on this through 2024. 

What do you think have been the highlights for Owlstone Medical during 2023? 

We’ve achieved some significant milestones this past year! In April we launched our consumer health brand OMED Health. The aim of OMED Health is to empower people living with digestive health issues by deploying our breath analysis technology, including breath test kits and a future analyzer device, developed with the support of gut health experts, to provide people with a solution they can actually trust instead of fad diets, supplements, apps, and devices that have little or no scientific basis. 

There has been some great development across our disease programs. Our lung cancer clinical trial, Evolution, has entered Phase 2 following the achievement of safety and proof of concept milestones during Phase 1. Phase 1 also helped us assess the optimal dose and sampling time and demonstrated the release of D5-ethanol on patients’ breath following probe administration in the presence of lung cancers as early as stage 1. 

This study is of particular importance to us as it demonstrates the potential of our EVOC® approach in developing a breath test to address the need for more effective early detection of lung cancer. Among other studies, we have also published encouraging data using the EVOC method to detect liver cirrhosis and research investigating using breath analysis to profile the gut microbiome. 

We also released the 4th edition of the Breath Biopsy Guide. This is our go to handbook for breath research, covering the applications of Breath Biopsy alongside methodologies and case studies. It’s definitely the place to start when getting to grips with breath analysis. 

Finally, the 2023 Breath Biopsy Conference returned as strong as ever with over 600 registrants. It was fantastic to welcome an array of speakers from across the world to present their latest research and share their expertise in a wide range of breath research areas. I think the highlight of the event was our panel discussion in which I sat down with a number of experts to discuss the key issues facing the field. 

What are you excited about for Owlstone Medical in 2024? 

There are several things that I think will be very exciting for us moving forward into 2024. We are planning on releasing our OMED Health Breath Analyzer device this year which will be a huge step in our consumer health offering. This device enables people to track the levels of hydrogen and methane on their breath at home and on the go. Interpretations of the data by our expert team of physiologists will allow patients to have a greater understanding of their digestive health symptoms and whether they have any underlying intolerances and conditions. 

The ongoing work on the Evolution trial is also going to be key for Owlstone in 2024. We have partnered with hospitals and clinical sites in the UK and across Europe to recruit patients to assess the diagnostic performance of the test. This will then enable us to work on optimizing the test by refining the protocol. We hope this test will provide a new means to non-invasively screen at-risk populations so lung cancers can be detected early when they can be treated with greater efficacy. 

The planning for the 2024 Breath Biopsy Conference has already begun, and we are really looking forward to inviting researchers, industry leaders, and practitioners from around the world to join us in another exploration of the forefront of breath research. Every year brings new insights and fresh perspectives to the field and it's always a privilege to share these with our community.  

If you are interested in a comprehensive overview of breath research during 2023, all the sessions from this year’s conference are available for free and on-demand on our website. 

If you’d like to discuss the application of breath analysis into your research, please get in touch.