Rapid Assessment of Individual Soldier Operational Readiness

Human breath contains a treasure-trove of metabolic data, which has the potential to provide real time information representing an individual's baseline health status or rapidly categorize baseline deviations related to environmental stressors, including, biological or chemical agents, physical, heat and cold stress, sleep deprivation, pollutant or allergen exposure, and disease. The most prevalent and discriminating group of biomarkers in breath are the lipid regulatory molecules. We propose to quantitatively assess individual soldier operational readiness with a non-invasive, rapid, analysis of regulatory lipids in expired breath condensate. Proof-of-principal experiments, supported by DARPA, have demonstrated that regulatory lipid biomarkers (eicosanoids and platelet activation factors) are expressed in the breath condensate of mice, rats and piglets exposed to various toxins and pathogens. The biomarker data was reproducible and correlated to presymptomatic inductions of cytokines and host response proteins; both key indicators of immune system activation. Moreover, the data indicate that the pattern of lipid regulator molecules expressed were unique for each stressor. Phase I will test thirty subjects to demonstrate: 1) reproducibility of recovery, 2) individual and group baseline responses while at metabolic rest, physically stressed (aerobic exercise), and sleep deprived 3) profile discriminatory patterns representing the various stressed and unstressed states.