A Breath of Change: Detect-ION and Mayo Clinic Florida Team Up to Hunt Pneumonia from the Air We Exhale

New collaboration aims to read infections in breath, backed by MC-AIR funding

Detect-ION and Mayo Clinic Florida announced a collaboration to develop breath-based diagnostic tests for pathogens that cause pneumonia. The project is funded through the MC-AIR program, and its high-level aim is simple: find a way to identify the organisms that lead to lung infections from a patient’s exhaled breath, rather than relying on slow or invasive methods. If it works, clinicians could send fewer patients home with guesswork, and treatment could start sooner.

What the MC-AIR-funded project will do: teams, targets and technology roles

The work pairs Detect-ION’s breath-sensing platform with clinical research and patient access at Mayo Clinic Florida. Detect-ION brings sensor arrays and the machine-learning tools that translate raw breath signals into diagnostic patterns. Mayo Clinic Florida will contribute clinical samples, access to patients with suspected pneumonia, and the clinical expertise needed to design and run validation studies.

The announcement says the study will focus on common pneumonia-causing pathogens, covering both bacterial and viral culprits that routinely land people in the hospital. The partners plan to collect breath samples from people with respiratory symptoms, compare breath signatures to standard lab tests, and refine the algorithms that try to match patterns in breath to specific pathogens.

MC-AIR funding supports the early-stage work: assembling datasets, running pilots that establish technical feasibility, and preparing the ground for larger clinical trials if initial results look promising.

How breath-based diagnostics work — science, methods and early evidence

Breath diagnostics try to turn the air we exhale into medical information. There are two broad approaches: one looks for tiny chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that change when the body fights an infection; the other looks for fragments or markers directly linked to microbes. Both approaches use instruments — anything from sensor chips to mass spectrometers — to capture and measure molecules in breath, then software looks for patterns that match disease signatures.

Detect-ION’s platform uses a mix of sensors and pattern-recognition models to detect subtle chemical fingerprints. In practice that means sampling breath, running the sample through sensors, and using trained algorithms to decide whether the pattern looks like a particular pathogen or a noninfectious cause.

There is a small but growing body of pilot work showing breath tests can flag infections — studies have explored breath markers for tuberculosis, COVID-19 and bacterial lung infections — but results have been uneven. Breath is a noisy sample: what you ate, whether you smoke, other illnesses, and even room air can change readings. That is why larger, carefully controlled clinical studies are required before any device can be trusted for routine care. The partners acknowledge that experiments to date are preliminary and that performance can vary across settings.

Potential clinical value and the road to clinical use and commercialization

If breath tests reach the accuracy needed for real-world use, the benefits are clear: faster results, noninvasive sampling, less reliance on chest X-rays or sputum cultures, and better triage in emergency rooms and clinics. In practical terms, a reliable breath test could mean starting the right antibiotic sooner, avoiding unnecessary antibiotics, or identifying viral infections that need different care.

But the path is long. The team must prove the tests are sensitive enough to catch infections and specific enough to avoid false alarms. They will need multi-site clinical validation, regulatory review, manufacturing scale-up, and payment models that make clinical use viable. Realistically, that timeline runs into multiple years of work; this collaboration is an early but necessary step in that direction.

Next steps, quotes from partners and how this fits into the diagnostics landscape

Immediate next steps are straightforward: enroll patients, collect breath and comparator samples, train and test the analytic models, and report early performance metrics. The partners expect to move through feasibility pilots first, then expand to larger validation cohorts if results meet prespecified targets.

The public announcement quoted Detect-ION as saying the collaboration “brings clinical depth and real-world data to our breath platform,” and quoted Mayo Clinic Florida as noting that breath testing could “offer a faster, less invasive route to diagnosing respiratory infections.” Those lines underline the project’s twofold strategy: couple a sensing technology with clinical rigor.

This effort sits inside a broader trend: researchers and startups are increasingly betting that noninvasive diagnostics — breath, saliva, and wearable sensors — can shift care toward earlier, simpler testing. Success will depend on whether these tools can clear tough accuracy and regulatory hurdles. For now, Detect-ION and Mayo Clinic Florida have launched the steps that will show whether the idea works beyond pilot studies.