Breath, biofluids, and beyond: Advancing biomarker discovery toward non-invasive diagnostics
Webinar
Event overview
Breathomics has emerged as a powerful non-invasive approach for biomarker discovery, revealing VOCs associated with disease processes. As the field matures, there is growing demand to go beyond discovery—to validate findings, understand biological mechanisms, and enable clinical translation.
In this webinar, researchers from the Hanna Group at Imperial College, London will present how advanced analytical workflows originally developed for breath analysis are now being extended across diverse biological matrices. They will showcase applications supporting translational metabolomics studies in early cancer detection, therapy monitoring, and real-time metabolic profiling.
This session will demonstrate how breath biomarker technologies are expanding to provide broader insights into human health and disease, effectively bridging discovery with clinical translation.
Join us to discover how the Hanna Group’s integrated approaches are advancing translational metabolomics and accelerating breath biomarker discovery with broad clinical impact.
Learning objectives
- Understand the emerging role of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in precision medicine and non-invasive diagnostics.
- Learn how thermal desorption coupled with 2-dimensional gas chromatography and time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TD–GC×GC–TOF MS), the core technology in breath biomarker discovery, can be applied across cells, biofluids, and tissues.
- Understand the role of high-capacity sorptive extraction (HiSorb) in advancing in vitro and ex vivo metabolic studies.
- Gain practical strategies to adapt VOC workflows beyond breath for multi-matrix investigations.
- Learn how stand-alone dynamic headspace sampling with Micro-Chamber/Thermal Extractor™ enhances continuous VOC monitoring of cell cultures when combined with real-time mass spectrometers.
Who should attend
- Analytical scientists and researchers in breath biomarker discovery and broader metabolomics.
- Clinical researchers focused on noninvasive diagnostics, therapeutic monitoring, and precision medicine.
- Scientists working with VOC analysis across biological matrices in translational metabolomics.
- Laboratory managers and method developers implementing advanced volatilomics workflows
Presenters
Aaron Parker
Lab Manager & Senior Analytical Scientist, Hanna Group, Imperial College, London, UK
Aaron Parker manages laboratory operations for breath-based cancer biomarker research. His work focuses on developing, optimizing, and validating sampling, analytical, and data-handling workflows for volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis, employing techniques such as SIFT-MS, GC–TOF MS, and thermal desorption to support non-invasive diagnostics for gastrointestinal cancer.
Philip Leung, PhD, FEHA
Postdoctoral Researcher, Hanna Group, Imperial College, London, UK
Philip Leung investigates VOC signatures linked to metabolic reprogramming in esophagogastric cancer. His work integrates headspace analysis, multiomics, and computational modeling to identify biomarkers for early detection and treatment stratification.
Sameera Sharma, MBBS, MRSC
Specialty Registrar & PhD Candidate, Hanna Group, Imperial College, London, UK
Sameera Sharma, MBBS, MRCS, is a specialty general surgery registrar and National Institute for Health and Care Research doctoral fellow. Her PhD study, titled ViSON, aims to develop a breath-based clinical prediction model to diagnose esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.
Caoimhe Walsh, MBBS, BSc, MRCS
General Surgery Registrar & MRC Clinical Research Fellow, Hanna Group, Imperial College, London, UK
Caoimhe Walsh is undertaking a PhD degree in the Hanna Group. Her research focuses on the production of VOCs from a laboratory model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma consisting of patient-derived organoids. This aims to provide insight into pathways involved in VOC production in pancreatic cancer, and complements the research being undertaken by the wider Hanna Group to develop breath tests for multiple gastrointestinal cancers based on exhaled VOCs.
