The Only Hydroxychloroquine Story You Need to Read
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
Hydroxychloroquine has been shown not to provide benefit for COVID-19 patients in multiple randomized controlled trials, despite continuous misinformation asserting its alleged effectiveness.
In the early days of a pandemic caused by a virus with no existing treatments, many different compounds are often considered and tried in an attempt to help patients.
It all relates back to a profound question: How do we know what we know?
Many of these treatments fall by the wayside as evidence accumulates regarding actual efficacy. At that point, other treatments become standard of care once their benefit is proven in rigorously designed trials.
However, about seven months into the pandemic, we're still seeing political resurrection of a treatment that has been systematically studied and demonstrated in well-designed randomized controlled trials to not have benefit.
The hydroxychloroquine (and by extension chloroquine) story is a complicated one that was difficult to follow even before it became infused with politics. It is a simple fact that these drugs, long approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), work in Petri dishes against various viruses including coronaviruses. This set of facts provided biological plausibility to support formally studying their use in the clinical treatment and prevention of COVID-19. As evidence from these studies accumulates, it is a cognitive requirement to integrate that knowledge and not to evade it. This also means evaluating the rigor of the studies.
In recent days we have seen groups yet again promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine in, what is to me, a baffling disregard of the multiple recent studies that have shown no benefit. Indeed, though FDA-approved for other indications like autoimmune conditions and preventing malaria, the emergency use authorization for COVID-19 has been rescinded (which means the government cannot stockpile it). Still, however, many patients continue to ask for the drug, compelled by political commentary, viral videos, and anecdotal data. Yet most doctors (like myself) are refusing to write the prescriptions outside of a clinical trial – a position endorsed by professional medical organizations such as the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Why this disconnect?
It all relates back to a profound question: How do we know what we know? In science, we use the scientific method – the process of observing reality, coming up with a hypothesis about what might be true, and testing that hypothesis as thoroughly as possible until we discover the objective truth.
The confusion we're seeing now stems from an inability to distinguish between anecdotes reported by physicians (observational data) and an actual evidence base. This is understandable among the general public but when done by a healthcare professional, it reveals a disdain for reason, logic, and the scientific method.
The Difference Between Observational Data and Randomized Controlled Trials
The power of informal observation is crucial. It is part of the scientific method but primarily as a basis for generating hypotheses that we can test. How do we conduct medical tests? The gold standard is the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. This means that neither the researchers nor the volunteers know who is getting a drug and who is getting a sugar pill. Then both groups of the trial, called arms, can be compared to determine whether the people who got the drug fared better. This study design prevents biases and the placebo effect from confounding the data and undermining the veracity of the results.
For example, a seemingly beneficial effect might be seen in an observational study with no blinding and no control group. In such a case, all patients are openly given the drug and their doctors observe how they do. A prime example is the 36-patient single-arm study from France that generated a tremendous amount of interest after President Trump tweeted about it. But this kind of a study by its nature cannot answer the critical question: Was the positive effect because of hydroxychloroquine or just the natural course of the illness? In other words, would someone have recovered in a similar fashion regardless of the drug? What is the role of the placebo effect?
These are reasons why it is crucial to give a placebo to a control group that is as similar in every respect as possible to those receiving the intervention. Then we attempt to find out by comparing the two groups: What is the side effect profile of the drug? Are the groups large enough to detect a relatively rare safety concern? How long were the patients followed for? Was something else responsible for making the patients get better, such as the use of steroids (as likely was the case in the Henry Ford study)?
Looking at the two major hydroxychloroquine trials, it is apparent that, when studied using the best tools of clinical trials, no benefit is likely to occur.
All of these considerations amount to just a fraction of the questions that can be answered more definitively in a well-designed large randomized controlled trial than in observational studies. Indeed, an observational study from New York failed to show any benefit in hospitalized patients, showing how unclear and disparate the results can be with these types of studies. A New York retrospective study (which examined patient outcomes after they were already treated) had similar results and included the use of azithromycin.
When evaluating a study, it is also important to note whether conflicts of interest exist, as well as the quality of the peer review and the data itself. In the case of the French study, for example, the paper was published in a journal in which one of the authors was editor-in-chief, and it was accepted for publication after 24 hours. Patients who fared poorly on hydroxychloroquine were also left out of the study altogether, skewing the results.
What Randomized Controlled Trials Have Shown
Looking at the two major hydroxychloroquine trials, it is apparent that, when studied using the best tools of clinical trials, no benefit is likely to occur. The most important of these studies to announce results was part of the Recovery trial, which was designed to test multiple interventions in the treatment of COVID-19. This trial, which has yet to be formally published, was a randomized controlled trial that involved over 1500 hospitalized patients being administered hydroxychloroquine compared to over 3000 who did not receive the medication. Clinical testing requires large numbers of patients to have the power to demonstrate statistical significance -- the threshold at which any apparent benefit is more than you would expect by random chance alone.
In this study, hydroxychloroquine provided no mortality benefit or even a benefit in hospital length of stay. In fact, the opposite occurred. Hydroxychloroquine patients were more likely to stay in the hospital longer and were more likely to require mechanical ventilation. Additionally, smaller randomized trials conducted in China have not shown benefit either.
Another major study involved the use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent illness in people who were exposed to COVID-19. These results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, included over 800 patients who were studied in a randomized double-blind controlled trial and also failed to show any benefit.
But what about adding the antibiotic azithromycin in conjunction with hydroxychloroquine? A three-arm randomized controlled study involving over 500 patients hospitalized with mild to moderate COVID-19 was conducted. Its results, also published in The New England Journal of Medicine, failed to show any benefit – with or without azithromycin – and demonstrated evidence of harm. Those who received these treatments had elevations of their liver function tests and heart rhythm abnormalities. These findings hold despite the retraction of an observational study showing similar results.
Additionally, when used in combination with remdesivir – an experimental antiviral – hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be associated with worse outcomes and more side effects.
But what about in mildly ill patients not requiring hospitalization? There was no benefit found in a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of 400 patients, the majority of whom were given the drug within one day of symptoms.
Some randomized controlled studies have yet to report their findings on hydroxychloroquine in non-hospitalized patients, with the use of zinc (which has some evidence in the treatment of the common cold, another ailment that can be caused by coronaviruses). And studies have yet to come out regarding whether hydroxychloroquine can prevent people from getting sick before they are even exposed. But the preponderance of the evidence from studies designed specifically to find benefit for treating COVID-19 does not support its use outside of a research setting.
Today – even with some studies (including those with zinc) still ongoing – if a patient asked me to prescribe them hydroxychloroquine for any severity or stage of illness, with or without zinc, with or without azithromycin, I would refrain. I would explain that, based on the evidence from clinical trials that has been amassed, there is no reason to believe that it will alter the course of illness for the better.
Failing to recognize the reality of the situation runs the risk of crowding out other more promising treatments and creating animosity where none should exist.
What has been occurring is a continual shifting of goalposts with each negative hydroxychloroquine study. Those in favor of the drug protest that a trial did not include azithromycin or zinc or wasn't given at the right time to the right patients. While there may be biological plausibility to treating illness early or combining treatments with zinc, it can only be definitively shown in a randomized, controlled prospective study.
The bottom line: A study that only looks at past outcomes in one group of patients – even when well conducted – is at most hypothesis generating and cannot be used as the sole basis for a new treatment paradigm.
Some may argue that there is no time to wait for definitive studies, but no treatment is benign. The risk/benefit ratio is not the same for every possible use of the drug. For example, hydroxychloroquine has a long record of use in rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus (whose patients are facing shortages because of COVID-19 related demand). But the risk of side effects for many of these patients is worth taking because of the substantial benefit the drug provides in treating those conditions.
In COVID-19, however, the disease apparently causes cardiac abnormalities in a great deal of many mild cases, a situation that should prompt caution when using any drugs that have known effects on the cardiac system -- drugs like hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
My Own Experience
It is not the case that every physician was biased against this drug from the start. Indeed, most of us wanted it to be shown to be beneficial, as it was a generic drug that was widely available and very familiar. In fact, early in the pandemic I prescribed it to hospitalized patients on two occasions per a hospital protocol. However, it is impossible for me as a sole clinician to know whether it worked, was neutral, or was harmful. In recent days, however, I have found the hydroxychloroquine talk to have polluted the atmosphere. One recent patient was initially refusing remdesivir, a drug proven in large randomized trials to have effectiveness, because he had confused it with hydroxychloroquine.
Moving On to Other COVID Treatments: What a Treatment Should Do
The story of hydroxychloroquine illustrates a fruitless search for what we are actually looking for in a COVID-19 treatment. In short, we are looking for a medication that can decrease symptoms, decrease complications, hasten recovery, decrease hospitalizations, decrease contagiousness, decrease deaths, and prevent infection. While it is unlikely to find a single antiviral that can accomplish all of these, fulfilling even just one is important.
For example, remdesivir hastens recovery and dexamethasone decreases mortality. Definitive results of the use of convalescent plasma and immunomodulating drugs such as siltuxamab, baricitinib, and anakinra (for use in the cytokine storms characteristic of severe disease) are still pending, as are the trials with monoclonal antibodies.
While it was crucial that the medical and scientific community definitively answer the questions surrounding the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19, it is time to face the facts and accept that its use for the treatment of this disease is not likely to be beneficial. Failing to recognize the reality of the situation runs the risk of crowding out other more promising treatments and creating animosity where none should exist.
Dr. Adalja is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine. Follow him on Twitter: @AmeshAA
Questions remain about new drug for hot flashes
In May, a new drug, Fezolinetant, was approved by the FDA to treat hot flashes associated with menopause.
Vascomotor symptoms (VMS) is the medical term for hot flashes associated with menopause. You are going to hear a lot more about it because a company has a new drug to sell. Here is what you need to know.
Menopause marks the end of a woman’s reproductive capacity. Normal hormonal production associated with that monthly cycle becomes erratic and finally ceases. For some women the transition can be relatively brief with only modest symptoms, while for others the body's “thermostat” in the brain is disrupted and they experience hot flashes and other symptoms that can disrupt daily activity. Lifestyle modification and drugs such as hormone therapy can provide some relief, but women at risk for cancer are advised not to use them and other women choose not to do so.
Fezolinetant, sold by Astellas Pharma Inc. under the product name Veozah™, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 12 to treat hot flashes associated with menopause. It is the first in a new class of drugs called neurokinin 3 receptor antagonists, which block specific neurons in the brain “thermostat” that trigger VMS. It does not appear to affect other symptoms of menopause. As with many drugs targeting a brain cell receptor, it must be taken continuously for a few days to build up a good therapeutic response, rather than working as a rescue product such as an asthma inhaler to immediately treat that condition.
Hot flashes vary greatly and naturally get better or resolve completely with time. That contributes to a placebo effect and makes it more difficult to judge the outcome of any intervention. Early this year, a meta analysis of 17 studies of drug trials for hot flashes found an unusually large placebo response in those types of studies; the placebo groups had an average of 5.44 fewer hot flashes and a 36 percent reduction in their severity.
In studies of fezolinetant, the drug recently approved by the FDA, the placebo benefit was strong and persistent. The drug group bested the placebo response to a statistically significant degree but, “If people have gone from 11 hot flashes a day to eight or seven in the placebo group and down to a couple fewer ones in the drug groups, how meaningful is that? Having six hot flashes a day is still pretty unpleasant,” says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research (NCHR), a health oriented think tank.
“Is a reduction compared to placebo of 2-3 hot flashes per day, in a population of women experiencing 10-11 moderate to severe hot flashes daily, enough relief to be clinically meaningful?” Andrea LaCroix asked a commentary published in Nature Medicine. She is an epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego and a leader of the MsFlash network that has conducted a handful of NIH-funded studies on menopause.
Questions Remain
LaCroix and others have raised questions about how Astellas, the company that makes the new drug, handled missing data from patients who dropped out of the clinical trials. “The lack of detailed information about important parameters such as adherence and missing data raises concerns that the reported benefits of fezolinetant very likely overestimate those that will be observed in clinical practice," LaCroix wrote.
In response to this concern, Anna Criddle, director of global portfolio communications at Astellas, wrote in an email to Leaps.org: “…a full analysis of data, including adherence data and any impact of missing data, was submitted for assessment by [the FDA].”
The company ran the studies at more than 300 sites around the world. Curiously, none appear to have been at academic medical centers, which are known for higher quality research. Zuckerman says, "When somebody is paid to do a study, if they want to get paid to do another study by the same company, they will try to make sure that the results are the results that the company wants.”
Criddle said that Astellas picked the sites “that would allow us to reach a diverse population of women, including race and ethnicity.”
A trial of a lower dose of the drug was conducted in Asia. In March 2022, Astellas issued a press release saying it had failed to prove effectiveness. No further data has been released. Astellas still plans to submit the data, according to Criddle. Results from clinical trials funded by the U.S. goverment must be reported on clinicaltrials.gov within one year of the study's completion - a deadline that, in this case, has expired.
The measurement scale for hot flashes used in the studies, mild-moderate-severe, also came in for criticism. “It is really not good scale, there probably isn’t a broad enough range of things going on or descriptors,” says David Rind. He is chief medical officer of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a nonprofit authority on new drugs. It conducted a thorough review and analysis of fezolinestant using then existing data gathered from conference abstracts, posters and presentations and included a public stakeholder meeting in December. A 252-page report was published in January, finding “considerable uncertainty about the comparative net health benefits of fezolinetant” versus hormone therapy.
Questions surrounding some of these issues might have been answered if the FDA had chosen to hold a public advisory committee meeting on fezolinetant, which it regularly does for first in class medicines. But the agency decided such a meeting was unnecessary.
Cost
There was little surprise when Astellas announced a list price for fezolinetant of $550 a month ($6000 annually) and a program of patient assistance to ease out of pocket expenses. The company had already incurred large expenses.
In 2017 Astellas purchased the company that originally developed fezolinetant for $534 million plus several hundred million in potential royalties. The drug company ran a "disease awareness” ad, Heat on the Street, hat aired during the Super Bowl in February, where 30 second ads cost about $7 million. Industry analysts have projected sales to be $1.9 billion by 2028.
ICER’s pre-approval evaluation said fezolinetant might "be considered cost-effective if priced around $2,000 annually. ... [It]will depend upon its price and whether it is considered an alternative to MHT [menopause hormone treatment] for all women or whether it will primarily be used by women who cannot or will not take MHT."
Criddle wrote that Astellas set the price based on the novelty of the science, the quality of evidence for the drug and its uniqueness compared to the rest of the market. She noted that an individual’s payment will depend on how much their insurance company decides to cover. “[W]e expect insurance coverage to increase over the course of the year and to achieve widespread coverage in the U.S. over time.”
Leaps.org wrote to and followed up with nine of the largest health insurers/providers asking basic questions about their coverage of fezolinetant. Only two responded. Jennifer Martin, the deputy chief consultant for pharmacy benefits management at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the agency “covers all drugs from the date that they are launched.” Decisions on whether it will be included in the drug formulary and what if any copays might be required are under review.
“[Fezolinetant] will go through our standard P&T Committee [patient and treatment] review process in the next few months, including a review of available efficacy data, safety data, clinical practice guidelines, and comparison with other agents used for vasomotor symptoms of menopause," said Phil Blando, executive director of corporate communications for CVS Health.
Other insurers likely are going through a similar process to decide issues such as limiting coverage to women who are advised not to use hormones, how much copay will be required, and whether women will be required to first try other options or obtain approvals before getting a prescription.
Rind wants to see a few years of use before he prescribes fezolinetant broadly, and believes most doctors share his view. Nor will they be eager to fill out the additional paperwork required for women to participate in the Astellas patient assistance program, he added.
Safety
Astellas is marketing its drug by pointing out risks of hormone therapy, such as a recent paper in The BMJ, which noted that women who took hormones for even a short period of time had a 24 percent increased risk of dementia. While the percentage was scary, the combined number of women both on and off hormones who developed dementia was small. And it is unclear whether hormones are causing dementia or if more severe hot flashes are a marker for higher risk of developing dementia. This information is emerging only after 80 years of hundreds of millions of women using hormones.
In contrast, the label for fezolinetant prohibits “concomitant use with CYP1A2 inhibitors” and requires testing for liver and kidney function prior to initiating the drug and every three months thereafter. There is no human or animal data on use in a geriatric population, defined as 65 or older, a group that is likely to use the drug. Only a few thousand women have ever taken fezolinetant and most have used it for just a few months.
Options
A woman seeking relief from symptoms of menopause would like to see how fezolintant compares with other available treatment options. But Astellas did not conduct such a study and Andrea LaCroix says it is unlikely that anyone ever will.
ICER has come the closest, with a side-by-side analysis of evidence-based treatments and found that fezolinetant performed quite similarly and modestly as the others in providing relief from hot flashes. Some treatments also help with other symptoms of menopause, which fezolinetant does not.
There are many coping strategies that women can adopt to deal with hot flashes; one of the most common is dressing in layers (such as a sleeveless blouse with a sweater) that can be added or subtracted as conditions require. Avoiding caffeine, hot liquids, and spicy foods is another common strategy. “I stopped drinking hot caffeinated drinks…for several years, and you get out of the habit of drinking them,” says Zuckerman.
LaCroix curates those options at My Meno Plan, which includes a search function where you can enter your symptoms and identify which treatments might work best for you. It also links to published research papers. She says the goal is to empower women with information to make informed decisions about menopause.
A company in England has made a test that picks out the compounds from breath that reveal if people have liver disease.
Every year, around two million people worldwide die of liver disease. While some people inherit the disease, it’s most commonly caused by hepatitis, obesity and alcoholism. These underlying conditions kill liver cells, causing scar tissue to form until eventually the liver cannot function properly. Since 1979, deaths due to liver disease have increased by 400 percent.
The sooner the disease is detected, the more effective treatment can be. But once symptoms appear, the liver is already damaged. Around 50 percent of cases are diagnosed only after the disease has reached the final stages, when treatment is largely ineffective.
To address this problem, Owlstone Medical, a biotech company in England, has developed a breath test that can detect liver disease earlier than conventional approaches. Human breath contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that change in the first stages of liver disease. Owlstone’s breath test can reliably collect, store and detect VOCs, while picking out the specific compounds that reveal liver disease.
“There’s a need to screen more broadly for people with early-stage liver disease,” says Owlstone’s CEO Billy Boyle. “Equally important is having a test that's non-invasive, cost effective and can be deployed in a primary care setting.”
The standard tool for detection is a biopsy. It is invasive and expensive, making it impractical to use for people who aren't yet symptomatic. Meanwhile, blood tests are less invasive, but they can be inaccurate and can’t discriminate between different stages of the disease.
In the past, breath tests have not been widely used because of the difficulties of reliably collecting and storing breath. But Owlstone’s technology could help change that.
The team is testing patients in the early stages of advanced liver disease, or cirrhosis, to identify and detect these biomarkers. In an initial study, Owlstone’s breathalyzer was able to pick out patients who had early cirrhosis with 83 percent sensitivity.
Boyle’s work is personally motivated. His wife died of colorectal cancer after she was diagnosed with a progressed form of the disease. “That was a big impetus for me to see if this technology could work in early detection,” he says. “As a company, Owlstone is interested in early detection across a range of diseases because we think that's a way to save lives and a way to save costs.”
How it works
In the past, breath tests have not been widely used because of the difficulties of reliably collecting and storing breath. But Owlstone’s technology could help change that.
Study participants breathe into a mouthpiece attached to a breath sampler developed by Owlstone. It has cartridges are designed and optimized to collect gases. The sampler specifically targets VOCs, extracting them from atmospheric gases in breath, to ensure that even low levels of these compounds are captured.
The sampler can store compounds stably before they are assessed through a method called mass spectrometry, in which compounds are converted into charged atoms, before electromagnetic fields filter and identify even the tiniest amounts of charged atoms according to their weight and charge.
The top four compounds in our breath
In an initial study, Owlstone captured VOCs in breath to see which ones could help them tell the difference between people with and without liver disease. They tested the breath of 46 patients with liver disease - most of them in the earlier stages of cirrhosis - and 42 healthy people. Using this data, they were able to create a diagnostic model. Individually, compounds like 2-Pentanone and limonene performed well as markers for liver disease. Owlstone achieved even better performance by examining the levels of the top four compounds together, distinguishing between liver disease cases and controls with 95 percent accuracy.
“It was a good proof of principle since it looks like there are breath biomarkers that can discriminate between diseases,” Boyle says. “That was a bit of a stepping stone for us to say, taking those identified, let’s try and dose with specific concentrations of probes. It's part of building the evidence and steering the clinical trials to get to liver disease sensitivity.”
Sabine Szunerits, a professor of chemistry in Institute of Electronics at the University of Lille, sees the potential of Owlstone’s technology.
“Breath analysis is showing real promise as a clinical diagnostic tool,” says Szunerits, who has no ties with the company. “Owlstone Medical’s technology is extremely effective in collecting small volatile organic biomarkers in the breath. In combination with pattern recognition it can give an answer on liver disease severity. I see it as a very promising way to give patients novel chances to be cured.”
Improving the breath sampling process
Challenges remain. With more than one thousand VOCs found in the breath, it can be difficult to identify markers for liver disease that are consistent across many patients.
Julian Gardner is a professor of electrical engineering at Warwick University who researches electronic sensing devices. “Everyone’s breath has different levels of VOCs and different ones according to gender, diet, age etc,” Gardner says. “It is indeed very challenging to selectively detect the biomarkers in the breath for liver disease.”
So Owlstone is putting chemicals in the body that they know interact differently with patients with liver disease, and then using the breath sampler to measure these specific VOCs. The chemicals they administer are called Exogenous Volatile Organic Compound) probes, or EVOCs.
Most recently, they used limonene as an EVOC probe, testing 29 patients with early cirrhosis and 29 controls. They gave the limonene to subjects at specific doses to measure how its concentrations change in breath. The aim was to try and see what was happening in their livers.
“They are proposing to use drugs to enhance the signal as they are concerned about the sensitivity and selectivity of their method,” Gardner says. “The approach of EVOC probes is probably necessary as you can then eliminate the person-to-person variation that will be considerable in the soup of VOCs in our breath.”
Through these probes, Owlstone could identify patients with liver disease with 83 percent sensitivity. By targeting what they knew was a disease mechanism, they were able to amplify the signal. The company is starting a larger clinical trial, and the plan is to eventually use a panel of EVOC probes to make sure they can see diverging VOCs more clearly.
“I think the approach of using probes to amplify the VOC signal will ultimately increase the specificity of any VOC breath tests, and improve their practical usability,” says Roger Yazbek, who leads the South Australian Breath Analysis Research (SABAR) laboratory in Flinders University. “Whilst the findings are interesting, it still is only a small cohort of patients in one location.”
The future of breath diagnosis
Owlstone wants to partner with pharmaceutical companies looking to learn if their drugs have an effect on liver disease. They’ve also developed a microchip, a miniaturized version of mass spectrometry instruments, that can be used with the breathalyzer. It is less sensitive but will enable faster detection.
Boyle says the company's mission is for their tests to save 100,000 lives. "There are lots of risks and lots of challenges. I think there's an opportunity to really establish breath as a new diagnostic class.”