Funding outcome

Children who have severe breathing diseases are rare. Their needs can be hard to meet. Some need mechanical breathing support like a ventilator. Ventilated children are often hospitalized for months or years. It takes families months to prepare for these children to come home. Children with severe asthma also spend a lot of time at the hospital with asthma attacks. It can be hard to know which medicines help children with severe asthma. Many of their medications have side effects so it is important to get them right. A big problem is how to 'see' what happens deep in the lungs. We mostly use x rays, lung function tests and blood tests. Sometimes we look with a camera (bronchoscopy) or take a lung biopsy. Many of these tests are invasive. A child has to get sick before the test can be used. This means we are catching up to problems, not preventing them. 'Breathomics' looks at what is in the air people breathe out. It can be used to measure what is happening in the body. It can also detect bacteria in the lungs. Catching breath is not invasive like blood tests or biopsies. Breathomics is a powerful tool but there is still a lot to understand before it can be used for patient care. Most studies take a single sample instead of following patients over time. Few studies have shown reliable ways to test children's breath. Our project proposes to study ways to make breath sampling for children and ventilated patients simple and easy to access. We will use breath samples to learn more about how patients do over time. This will help us learn to predict how patients will respond to different treatments or who will need to go home with a ventilator. We also hope to catch disease flare-ups as they start, instead of playing catch-up afterwards. Finally, we hope to learn who might be helped by which medicine.