Taking your breath away: metabolomics breathes life in to personalized medicine

• Breathomics is an upcoming bioanalytical area transforming point-of-care diagnostics.
• Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are an important source of potential diagnostic information.
• Current technologies bridge the gap from large analytical systems to portable sensor platforms.

Breath-based metabolomics (breathomics) is an exciting developing area of biotechnology that centers on the capture, identification, and quantification of volatile organic compound (VOC) patterns in human breath and their utilization as tools in the diagnosis of a broad spectrum of medical problems. With the age of personalized medicines demanding rapid bespoke diagnosis and treatment, this area of molecular diagnostics is beginning to see an upsurge in biotechnological advancement. Here, we discuss recent improvements and directions in the development of breath VOC analysis and diagnosis platforms that offer the potential for disease biomarker discovery and disease prognosis.