101520NanoBreathClosedLaunchpadInnovate UKOxford Micro Medical Ltd (OMM), a new start-up company based on the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, is developing a novel tabletop breath analysis system called NanoBreath. This will be used for diagnosing a range of medical conditions with the initial focus on H.pylori bacterial infection of the stomach which can cause ulcers and cancer.In the medium term, NanoBreath is also expected to be used to diagnose tudercolosis. The NanoBreath system is essentially a compact mass spectrometer which ionizes the breath sample and measures its chemical composition. It will make use of the existing urea breath test (UBT) which requires the patient to swallow a urea pill labelled with the stable isotope of carbon at atomic mass 13. The carbon dioxide exhaled by the patient will be rich in this isotope. The difference between NanoBreath and existing mass spectrometers and optical systems used for this test lies in its innovation technology which allows OMM to predict a market price of just £8,000 per NanoBreath analyzer. This compares with a range of prices for current systems of between £40,000 and £150,000 and will establish NanoBreath as the leading fully portable system in this field. NanoBreath is a genuinely "disruptive" technological development which will help in the important shift of location for disease diagnosis from hospital and public health laboratory to primary clinical practitioner at "point-of-care". OMM's MD card technology is based upon work done in the Space Science Department of the Science and Technology Facilities Council at Harwell. It is descended from Space mass spectrometry programmes, notably the Rosetta Space Mission to a comet.