Psychiatry remains one of the few areas of medicine where diagnosis and clinical decision-making still rely largely on symptom-based assessment.
This creates a major challenge: early-stage disorders such as schizophrenia can be difficult to detect, monitor, and stratify using clinical observation alone.
Our new white paper explores how volatilomics, the analysis of volatile organic compounds from breath, skin, and other biofluids, could contribute to a more objective and biologically informed future for psychiatry.
The key point is not that VOCs should become standalone diagnostic biomarkers.
Their real potential lies in acting as a non-invasive, repeatable monitoring layer, integrated with:
• multi-omics
• clinical data
• AI and multivariate models
• longitudinal patient assessment
Together, these approaches could support earlier detection, relapse-risk estimation, biological stratification, and treatment-response monitoring.
But responsible implementation matters. Validation, reproducibility, interpretability, ethics, and alignment with European regulatory frameworks will be critical before such tools can enter real-world psychiatric care.
This is where the VOLABIOS project aims to contribute: by advancing a clinically meaningful, scientifically robust, and human-centered framework for volatilomics-based precision psychiatry.