Authors: Petr Kubáň¹, Věra Dosedělová¹, Petra Itterheimová¹, František Foret¹

¹ Department of Bioanalytical Instrumentation, Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Veveří 97, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

e-mail: petr.kuban@iach.cz

Key words: non-invasive samples, saliva, exhaled breath condensate, sweat, novel diagnostic approaches.

Non-invasive biological fluids are becoming attractive in medical diagnostics. For instance, in the context of the latest Covid-19 pandemic, where throat swab and saliva samples were used in viral detection, the sampling of bodily fluids noninvasively can be used also in the context of other diseases. We have devoted the last decade to the development of various approaches to acquire such samples, including exhaled breath condensate (EBC), saliva, and sweat and developed many novel diagnostic approaches. In this presentation, the overview of the achievements from the last decade of our research will be shown. We shall discuss the instrumentation that was developed in our laboratory and approaches for sampling EBC, saliva, and sweat, and their different applications. The example include, for instance, the application of EBC in diagnosing pulmonary diseases. We will also discuss the analytical potential of saliva, as another non-invasive sample, which can be used in diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease. The analysis of various small molecules and bile acids in saliva will be presented and its clinical importance will be discussed. Eventually we will also show how sweat sampling and analysis can be done in a simple manner for diagnosing cystic fibrosis and present some recent novel approaches called skin-wipe and skin-wash, that utilize simple cotton swabs or 3D printed devices. Finally we will outline some sample preconcentration and pretreatment approaches to analyze trace amounts of different compounds in non-invasive samples that will conclude the variety of different approaches applied with microcolumn separation techniques for clinical diagnostics.

The study was supported by the Czech grant agency, grant no. 22-28315S.