Jane Hill - Toward Breath Tests for Infectious Diseases

Biography:

Dr. Hill is an Associate Professor at Dartmouth. Her team focuses on determining cross-sectional and individualized biomarker suites for infectious diseases, particularly those of the respiratory tract. Her team has helped to mature the breath-based biomarker approach through the development and optimization of chemical data acquisition and data analysis pipeline for untargeted metabolites in clinical populations. Her team is in the process of clinical validation of biomarkers for a number of infectious etiologies in addition to working with others to miniaturize and/or commercialize current benchtop systems for direct clinical translation.

Abstract: 

The diagnosis of most infectious diseases still uses or is based on technologies from the time of Louis Pasteur! To be fair, nucleic acid amplification technologies are revolutionizing some diagnostic areas, however, many patients will not benefit, and so we must find constructive alternatives. Here, I will present our efforts to deploy metabolomics and transcriptomics to diagnose respiratory infections quickly and accurately. I will share our progress on pre-clinical applications of breath analysis for tuberculosis profiling for animal health monitoring, antibiotic testing, and vaccine development, as well as our early work translating the same into clinics in South Africa in combination with efforts to enhance diagnosis effectiveness using blood transcriptional profiling.

Join us at the next Breath Biopsy Conference