Owlstone Medical, Actelion team up for pulmonary hypertension detection

Owlstone Medical has announced a strategic partnership with Actelion Pharmaceuticals. The global leader in Breath Biopsy for applications in early disease detection announced the collaboration to discover and validate a breath-based test to help facilitate the early diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension and its subtypes. This development program will be solely funded by Actelion. Currently, early diagnosis of PH is very difficult, and even at an advanced stage presents similar to other heart and lung conditions, so a delay of years between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis and treatment is unfortunately common. The collaboration will initially involve collecting breath exhaled Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from over 1,000 patients using Owlstone Medical’s proprietary sampling device, which will then be analysed by Owlstone Medical to identify those that are associated with PH, in order to develop biomarker signatures that can help facilitate earlier detection of the disease.