Cough Capture as a Portal Into the Lung

The lung is a privileged organ; blood does not reflect most lung processes well, if at all. Therefore, for population scale diagnostics, the investigator team is developing non-invasive portals to the lung, for eventual early detection/risk assessment and diagnostic purposes. However, large macromolecules are not likely suspended nor readily detected in the breath. In particular, genomic DNA in the breath condensate (EBC) is very sparse, and where present, generally highly fragmented, not readily amenable to sequencing based assessments of DNA somatic mutation burden or distribution. Because gDNA (and protein) is challenging to obtain non-invasively from EBC, the study team considered alternative surrogate lower airway specimens. Cough capture is rarely done, and the investigator team is in the process of optimizing its collection. Importantly, the team will be evaluating how much of cou