Niki Fens

Breathomics: nano solutions with major impact

Exhaled breath analysis (breathomics) is an innovative candidate tool for diagnosis and monitoring of diseases. As an integrative systems medicine approach it has potential for application in almost every field in medicine, providing fingerprints of diseases.

Ideas worth spreading

Niki is strongly motivated to speed up the process of validation and application of breathomics in medical diagnostics. Using electronic noses that measure disease-specific breathprints, diseases can be diagnosed earlier, in a non-invasive way, at low cost. Her research team is aiming to optimize the negative predictive value (exclusion of disease) of this technology. Ideally, an umbrella database of disease breathprints is created to which new breathprints are compared. To realize this, medical and technical forces need to be joined.

Biography

Niki Fens (Den Haag) MD, PhD, is a post-doc clinical researcher at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, department of Respiratory Medicine. She defended her thesis ’Breathomics in pulmonary disease’ in September 2011. The main topic of her research is the validation of breathomics in various diseases, pulmonary as well as non-pulmonary.

Niki received many awards for her research, including six conference (American Thoracic Society and European Respiratory Society) travel awards for excellent research from 2008 to 2011.