VOC-Based Probes, a New Set of Analytical Tools to Monitor Patient Health from Blood Sample. Proof of Concept on Tracking COVID-19 Infection
Résumé
Induced volatolomics is an emerging field that holdspromise formany biomedical applications including disease detection and prognosis.In this pilot study, we report the first use of a cocktail of volatileorganic compounds (VOCs)-based probes to highlight new metabolic markersallowing disease prognosis. In this pilot study, we specifically targeteda set of circulating glycosidases whose activities could be associatedwith critical COVID-19 illness. Starting from blood sample collection,our approach relies on the incubation of VOC-based probes in plasmasamples. Once activated, the probes released a set of VOCs in thesample headspace. The dynamic monitoring of the signals of VOC tracersenabled the identification of three dysregulated glycosidases in theinitial phase after infection, for which preliminary machine learninganalyses suggested an ability to anticipate critical disease development.This study demonstrates that our VOC-based probes are a new set ofanalytical tools that can provide access to biological signals untilnow unavailable to biologists and clinicians and which could be includedin biomedical research to properly construct multifactorial therapyalgorithms, necessary for personalized medicine.