PhD defence Robert van Vorstenbosch

Keywords: Gut health, Non-invasive diagnosis and monitoring, Volatilomics, Chemometrics

''Translational Volatilomics for Digestive Health: Advancing early-stage diagnosis and disease endotyping''

In the Netherlands one in five individuals suffers from digestive health complications. These result in significant costs and a serious logistic burden for healthcare professionals. For example, screening procedures for colorectal cancer using faecal blood tests have made a stunning contribution to reducing colorectal cancer deaths. They are crucial. However, as only 5% of the people that test positive for this screening test have colorectal cancer, it’s also a very expensive test with many unnecessary follow-up procedures. In this thesis, Robert investigated if volatile metabolites can be used to improve disease diagnosis for colorectal cancer, liver disease, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). To achieve this, he combined theory, lab work, and created novel data-analytical strategies. Based on his work, volatile metabolites seem to carry very large potential to diagnose early-stage liver disease and to help understand heterogeneous aspects of IBS. Also for colorectal cancer a strong potential was identified. 

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