Alison Quinn's Respiro Diagnostics raises GBP 1M for breath-based lung diagnostics

Why it matters

Respiro Diagnostics is chasing a large clinical gap: lung cancer screening is underused, while current diagnostics can be invasive, costly or hard to scale. The company has founder-market fit through Issitt's breath-analysis background and Quinn's healthcare commercialization experience, but the round is still a bet on evidence that has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Alison Quinn and Dr Theo Issitt have raised GBP 1 million in pre-seed funding for Respiro Diagnostics, the UK lung diagnostics company, according to a July 8 report from Tech.eu. The round was led by Zinc Venture Capital and SFC Capital, with participation from Amadeus Capital Partners, the Conception X Angel Syndicate, KQ Labs through the Francis Crick Institute, strategic angel investors and Innovate UK.

Respiro Diagnostics is trying to move lung diagnostics from tissue removal and blood draws toward a sample patients already produce: exhaled breath. Quinn is CEO and co-founder, and Issitt is co-founder.

"Our vision is simple: that one day, a breath sample is all it takes to know what's happening in your lungs - early, while there's still time to act," Quinn told Tech.eu.

That sentence is the pitch. The harder part is turning breath into clinically reliable molecular evidence. Respiro Diagnostics says its platform combines a proprietary breath collection device with laboratory methods that analyze DNA, RNA and proteins captured from breath samples.

The fundraise buys evidence, not scale

The GBP 1 million round is early money for a company that is still building clinical proof. Respiro Diagnostics has completed initial proof-of-concept testing in mesothelioma patients, according to Tech.eu, but the announcement did not disclose the number of patients, the comparator, or performance metrics such as sensitivity, specificity or false-positive rate.

The next milestone is clearer: Respiro Diagnostics plans to begin its first clinical study in lung cancer patients at Aalborg University Hospital in Denmark in September 2026. The round will fund that clinical research and continued work on Respiro Diagnostics' collection device and laboratory platform. Respiro Diagnostics is also evaluating pulmonary hypertension and asthma as possible future use cases, according to Tech.eu.

The round structure leaves several financial questions unanswered. The announcement did not disclose a valuation, check sizes, board seats, or how Innovate UK's participation fits into the round. Innovate UK funding can include non-dilutive support, so it should not be read automatically as the same kind of equity investment as the venture checks.

The investor mix still says something about the bet. For Respiro Diagnostics, the useful capital is patient, technical capital: clinical diagnostics companies do not usually get to revenue through landing pages and sales hires. They get there through study design, sample handling, regulatory work, clinical partnerships and enough reproducible data to persuade doctors that a new signal is worth acting on.

Breath diagnostics already have scars

Respiro Diagnostics is entering an area where the clinical need is obvious and the technical history is uneven. Lung cancer remains a leading cancer killer, and screening uptake is poor. In November 2025, the American Cancer Society said only about 1 in 5 eligible people in the U.S. received lung cancer screening in 2024.

That gap explains why founders keep returning to non-invasive lung tests. If a test is easier to take, easier to distribute and easier to repeat, it could pull more high-risk patients into screening or help clinicians decide what to do after imaging finds something ambiguous. Respiro Diagnostics' bet is that a molecular readout from breath can provide information that current tools either miss or obtain through more invasive means.

The competition is already active. Owlstone Medical has spent years building Breath Biopsy products and services around volatile organic compound analysis. Breath Diagnostics says its OneBreath technology captures early-stage lung cancer biomarkers from exhaled breath with 94% sensitivity and 85% specificity, and says those figures come from more than 800 patients. Breathomix is building the BreathBase system around eNose analysis of volatile organic compounds and publishes lung-cancer validation work on its site.

Blood-based competitors are moving too. PrognomiQ reported early real-world results for its ProVue Lung blood test in May 2026 and is offering it as a laboratory developed test in an early experience program, giving PrognomiQ a different path into clinical workflow from Respiro Diagnostics' still-planned lung cancer study.

Respiro Diagnostics' claimed distinction is that it is not describing a simple VOC-only breath test. Tech.eu reports that Respiro Diagnostics is capturing DNA, RNA and proteins from exhaled breath samples. If Respiro Diagnostics can show those signals are stable, lung-derived and clinically informative, the platform could sit closer to liquid biopsy than to traditional breathomics.

The study has to answer the practical questions

Breath is an appealing sample because it is accessible. Breath is also a difficult sample because collection, storage, contamination, humidity, particle capture and patient behavior can all affect results. A May 2026 arXiv paper on exhaled breath condensate argued that no exhaled-breath-condensate test had reached clinical use after decades of work across biomarkers and diseases, and the authors pointed to measurement variability as a central problem. That paper focuses on volatile biomarkers in condensate, so it is not a direct judgment on Respiro Diagnostics' DNA, RNA and protein approach. It does underline the standard Respiro Diagnostics will have to meet.

The Aalborg study will need to show more than a promising signal. It will need to show whether Respiro Diagnostics' device collects comparable samples across patients and sites, whether Respiro Diagnostics' lab process can distinguish cancer from benign disease, and whether the result can support a decision a clinician would actually make. The announcement does not disclose the planned enrollment size, endpoints, control group, or regulatory path.

For Quinn and Issitt, the GBP 1 million round is enough to move from scientific premise to clinical test design. It is not enough to settle the question Respiro Diagnostics is really asking: whether molecular material in exhaled breath can become a routine diagnostic layer for lung disease. The September study is where that claim starts facing the evidence burden.