bacterial infection – go down after antibiotic administration, thus enabling a way to firstly diagnose, hence helping to choose the right treatment, and secondly monitor the response to this intervention” explains Professor Sinues. The goal in the project is to prove that breath analysis can be used to diagnose pnenumonia, with a view towards eventually applying this approach in the clinic, although Professor Sinues sees it more as complementary to existing methods rather than as a replacement. “I see it first of all as a very rapid screening method. My goal is not to replace current methods, it’s simply to provide complementary information,” he stresses. “Currently there are molecular methods that work very well, but have certain limitations that we may be able to overcome in a complementary fashion.”
information there and then, rather than waiting two days until this information is available.” This is particularly important with drugs that have a very narrow therapeutic range, where too high a dosage would be toxic to the patient, and too low would be ineffective. Researchers aim to generate models that will enable medical staff to automatically calculate – on the basis of a breath test – the systemic concentration of a drug, which can then be used to guide decisions about dosage. “There is a clear clinical need to look at these drugs, to optimise the dosage of these drugs for patients. It’s also important to consider clinical and toxic effects. Is this drug really working or not?” points out Professor Sinues. Several different drugs will be investigated within the project, and while Professor
We have two main research lines in my lab. One is dedicated to trying to detect medication in breath, and to trying to correlate these breath values with the systemic concentrations of these drugs. The second is the diagnosis of pneumonia. Drug Dosage A second major priority in Professor Sinues’ group is to use breath analysis to quickly and accurately assess the systemic concentration of drugs in the body, which is enormously important in determining the right dosage of medication to treat children with certain conditions, for example epilepsy and cancer. Currently, children with epilepsy have to provide quite large volumes of blood during a consultation, the results of which may not be available for several days, whereas a reliable breath test would be much quicker and more patient-friendly. “We aim to screen patients that require monitoring of the levels of therapeutic drugs,” outlines Professor Sinues. “The idea is that, in future, neurologists (in the case of epilepsy patients) will have the result on the same day as the consultation, so they can make clinical decisions on the basis of this Project Team
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Sinues does not expect it will be possible to precisely assess the concentrations of all of them from breath analysis, he is confident that this research will bring wider benefits. “We are looking into bringing this concept to the market,” he says. “A start-up company named Deep Breath Initiative was launched at the University of Basel earlier this year to accomplish this endeavour.” This work is very much in line with the wider trend towards personalised medicine, and the goal of adapting and tailoring treatment more precisely to the specific needs of individual patients. The human population is quite heterogenous and one treatment doesn’t necessarily fit all, a major motivating factor behind Professor Sinues’ work. “We aim to understand the response of patients to an intervention, to try and optimise subsequent interventions,” he outlines.
GUIDED BY BREATH Individualized Drug Dosage Guided by Breath Project Objectives
The objective in this new project is to optimize the therapeutic regimen of pediatric patients to maximize drug efficacy and minimize side effects. This will be achieved by developing a mass spectrometry-based breath test. Ultimately, this will lead to new opportunities to guide the dosage of drugs with high precision, in real-time and in a patient-friendly fashion.
Project Funding
University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB) http://www.snf.ch/en/funding/careers/ eccellenza/Pages/default.aspx The two SNSF grants are: Pneumonia 320030_173168; Diagnosis of Bacterial Pneumonia by Exhaled Breath Analysis; Duration 4 years, budget 690,000 CHF. Drugs PCEGP3_181300; Individualized Drug Dosage Guided by Breath Analysis; Duration 5 years, budget 1,500,000 CHF. This is a prestigious Eccellenza grant
Project Partners
• Profs. Malcolm Kohler and Annelies Zinkernagel (University Hospital Zurich) • Prof. Alexander Möller (University Children’s Hospital Zurich) • Profs. Nicolas von der Weid, Johannes van den Anker, Urs Frey and PD Alexandre Datta (University Children’s Hospital Basel)
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Pablo Sinues, PhD Tenure Track Assistant Professor University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB) Department of Biomedical Engineering University of Basel Spitalstrasse 33 | CH-4056 Basel Switzerland T: +41 61 704 29 49 E: pablo.sinues@ukbb.ch W: www.sinueslab.dbe.unibas.ch Professor Pablo Sinues
Professor Pablo Sinues holds a master’s in chemistry, and a PhD in mechanical engineering. Visiting PhD and Postdoc at Yale University in former lab of Nobel Prize awardee Prof. John B. Fenn. Habilitation in analytical chemistry at the ETH Zurich. Since 2017 Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position at the University of Basel (Department of Biomedical Engineering).
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