Consortium Working to Reduce Disease Burden from Workplace Exposure

Breath Biopsy® applications developer Owlstone Medical has joined the EU-funded Exposome Project for Health and Occupational Research (EPHOR), a consortium aiming to further elucidate the complex relationships between environment and disease. The company will receive funding from the project to provide station and kits for the collection of breath samples and will perform analysis on samples received.

Bringing together exposure, health and data scientists, along with technology partners, EPHOR will develop knowledge, methods and tools to characterise the working-life exposome at a far deeper level than has previously been attempted. It will combine large-scale pooling of existing data (>40 cohorts; ~21 million people) and systematically look at a wide range of exposures and diseases. The information generated will be made available via a ‘working-life toolbox’, allowing scientists to use and enhance the data, methods and models currently in use in exposome research.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said: “Environmental exposures, including those from the workplace, are known to have a tremendous impact on the start and progression of disease. The EPHOR project promises to directly address this problem, contributing to reducing the burden of workplace exposure on healthcare systems and helping to improve the general health and wellbeing of the population.”

The EPHOR project, similar to the recently announced 3TR IMI2 Immunology Project1, demonstrates that Breath Biopsy is becoming a standard component of disease research and biomarker discovery, he added.

Additional information on the EPHOR project is available at www.ephor-project.eu

1. Further details at www.owlstone.com