About Respra

Built to catch disease
before it wins.

Respra targets the world's most preventable killer: late detection. Seven of the deadliest diseases share one failure: they're found too late. We fix that with a breath.

Investor Materials

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A concise overview of Respra's technology, market opportunity, and roadmap — designed for investors and strategic partners.

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Our Story

Why we
started Respra

Founded in 2026, Respra emerged from a clear observation: 2.1 billion people are affected by 7 diseases that share one exploitable failure — they all produce detectable molecular signatures in exhaled breath, and they are all consistently detected too late.

→ Lung cancer caught early has a 64–70% survival rate. Caught late — as 43% of cases currently are — that number falls below 10%.
→ TB spreads from one untreated person to 10–15 others before the carrier knows they're sick.
→ 252 million diabetics globally have no idea they have the disease.

This is not a treatment problem. It is a detection problem.

Current diagnostics are siloed by design. A TB workup costs ~$200. Blood panels for kidney disease run $150–$400. Each disease needs a separate test, a separate appointment, a separate result cycle — and only activates after symptoms appear. There is no natural entry point in the current system for a healthy person to be screened for seven conditions simultaneously.

Respra inserts a step before all of that. A portable device requiring no lab, no specialist, and no consumables beyond a $0.20 single-use mouthpiece. A patient breathes for 10 seconds. A 32-sensor gold nanoparticle array captures the VOC profile and shares results within a minute.

The goal is simple: make early detection as effortless as a deep breath, anywhere in the world.

The Science

The biology of
exhaled diagnostics

Every metabolic process in the body produces volatile byproducts. These compounds diffuse into the bloodstream and are exchanged into breath via the alveoli — the same mechanism that removes CO₂. What leaves your lungs is a molecular snapshot of your entire body's biochemistry.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)

When cells undergo abnormal metabolism, as in cancer, infection, or metabolic disease, they produce characteristic VOC patterns that differ from healthy tissue. In lung cancer, tumour cells release specific alkanes and aldehydes as byproducts of oxidative stress. In diabetes, elevated blood glucose drives ketone production; breath acetone is a direct metabolic marker validated across 20+ studies since 2009.

The challenge has historically been distinguishing disease signals from background noise, such as dietary variation, medication, environment. This is where Respra's federated AI transforms a research tool into a clinical one. Our models are trained on thousands of confirmed clinical breathprints, stratified for confounders, and validated on held-out external cohorts.

Principles

What we stand for

01 — Access

Diagnostics for everyone

Disease doesn't discriminate by geography or income. At $1,000–$1,500 per device and $15–$40 per test, Respra is designed for the hospital in Toronto and the district clinic in South Africa alike. No lab, no specialist, no infrastructure required.

02 — Precision

Clinical-grade or nothing

We hold ourselves to the same accuracy bar as established diagnostics. The lung cancer VOC panel has been validated at 89% accuracy in a 2023 IASLC trial. TB breath detection achieved 85%+ sensitivity across studies in Cameroon and South Africa. We publish our methodology openly.

03 — Speed

Time is tissue

In oncology, cardiology, and infectious disease, earlier detection translates directly to better outcomes. A $15–40 Respra test that catches one CKD patient early avoids $57,334/year in dialysis costs. Every design decision is optimized for speed — of test, of result, of action.

04 — Transparency

Open science

We believe the science underpinning our technology should be scrutinizable. Breathomics has 3,000+ peer-reviewed papers behind it. We build on that foundation, partner with academic institutions, and contribute back through open data-sharing.

"The difference between catching lung cancer at stage one and stage four is not a better therapy. It is a test that happened earlier."