About Respiratory Research
The Collection Infrastructure Behind Breath Biomarker Programs
Respiratory Research provides the standardized sample collection infrastructure on which analytical biomarker programs are built. Assays, platforms, and analytical methods turn over quickly. All of them depend on a sample collected the same way every time.
Respiratory Research, Inc. was founded in 2000 by researchers from the University of Virginia acting on a simple premise: exhaled breath contains a wealth of biological information, but realizing its potential requires reliable, standardized methods for collecting and preserving it. Twenty-five years later, we are a specialized life-science company serving universities, hospitals, research organizations, and pharmaceutical developers worldwide.
We are headquartered in Austin, Texas, with an international distributor network. Our products are manufactured in the United States within an ISO 13485 quality system and an ISO 8 cleanroom environment. We support customers ranging from individual investigators to large multi-site pharmaceutical trials requiring consistent product, controlled processes, lot traceability, and dependable production capacity.
RTube™: A Proven Method, Not Simply a Device
Our flagship RTube™ platform is the most widely used standardized approach to exhaled breath condensate collection, with more than 230,000 collections and more than 400 peer-reviewed studies worldwide.
RTube is more than a collection device. It represents a standardized method supported by decades of published scientific experience. A new device can be manufactured quickly; establishing confidence in a sampling method takes years of independent scientific use. The value of RTube lies in that accumulated record — the published literature, the researchers who built it, and the practical knowledge developed across hundreds of thousands of collections.
Its disposable design and simple collection process suit a wide range of settings, from specialized laboratories and hospitals to field studies, multicenter investigations, and decentralized pharmaceutical clinical trials.
Supporting Pharmaceutical Research
We have provided RTube sampling infrastructure and logistics services to studies as large as 1,500 collections as well as studies distributed across nearly 30 sites, all while providing full support to multiple smaller unrelated studies concurrently. Respiratory Research is a proven, dependable study partner with an established track record of providing consistent, scalable, standardized collection infrastructure meeting our customers' needs for over two decades. The RTube method provides reliable, reproducible collection outside traditional laboratory settings and fits the direction large and decentralized trials have moved.
Built for Long-Term Partnerships
After more than 25 years, our mission remains what it was at the start: to help researchers advance breath science by providing reliable, standardized, and practical tools for collecting the biological information contained in human breath.
Management
A. Rafi Baddour, P.E.
General Manager
Mr. Baddour serves as General Manager of Respiratory Research, with day-to-day responsibility for company operations. He is a subject matter expert in exhaled biomarker research and holds patents in several fields, including breath collection devices for biomarker analysis. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.
His team is currently focused on scaling RTube breath biomarker infrastructure to meet the demands of several large concurrent pharmaceutical clinical trials while ensuring device consistency and quality, manufacturing capacity that scales without drift, full lot traceability, and collection workflows that integrate cleanly into trial operations.
Mr. Baddour can be contacted directly at rbaddour@respiratoryresearch.com
John W. Vaughan
Secretary
Mr. Vaughan fills several supporting roles with Respiratory Research leveraging his detailed knowledge of the respiratory therapeutic and diagnostics markets. As Secretary, he works closely with Mr. Baddour to ensure all Board-level actions are properly executed. He also supports the Business Development activities of the Company by lending his Sales and Marketing experience as an advisor. In his prior role as Managing Director of Respiratory Research, Inc. Mr. Vaughan drove all sales and marketing activities as well as special projects. Prior to this Mr. Vaughan was a member of a research team at the University of Virginia and is a contributing author on several peer-reviewed publications in the field of exhaled biomarkers. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University.
Linda Heintz
Controller
Ms. Heintz currently manages all financial and federal/state compliance activities of the Company. Soon upon joining the Company in 2005 Ms. Heintz restructured its accounts, reporting processes, and financial management to achieve full compliance and approval as a US federal contractor. She continues to lead several major cost control activities as well as managing the day-to-day accounting including payroll, procurement, and tax. Her prior experience includes several years in public accounting as a Tax Specialist at KPMG as well as part-time roles in both non-profits and a private accounting practice. Ms. Heintz is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and a licensed CPA in Texas.
Advisory Board
Benjamin M. Gaston, M.D.
Scientific Advisory Board Member and Co-Founder
Dr. Gaston currently serves as Chief, Division of Pediatric Pulmonary, Allergy and Immunology and Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Gaston’s laboratory studies cysteine modifications downstream of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activation. These are relevant to cystic fibrosis (CF), asthma, pulmonary arterial hypertension and apnea. Dr. Gaston has nearly two decades’ experience with S-nitrosothiol assays, and state-of-the-art technology for detecting cysteine modifications downstream of NOS activation. He also has extensive experience studying NOS in cell and molecular biology. He holds several patents in the field and has authored over 100 publications. (more)
Edward G. Brooks, M.D.
Scientific Advisory Board Member
Dr. Brooks currently serves as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Brooks is Board Certified in Allergy and Immunology and has authored over 50 publications. His laboratory studies the interaction of environmental agents with inflammatory reactions in respiratory mucosa as it pertains to mechanisms of environmental allergy and asthma. Dr. Brooks has conducted a number of clinical and clinical research efforts to define the mechanisms of asthma and to improve the treatment of children with asthma. Dr. Brooks conducts a specialty clinic for children with asthma and is developing measures of oxidative stress in asthma using exhaled breath condensates in acute asthma and asthma associated with infectious diseases. (more)