Johan Guns
UZ Brussel · EU Regulatory Affairs
Co-author of the publications that opened the European regulatory debate on biological IAQ standards. His work positions AWLabs as the technological answer regulators are looking for.
The only platform detecting airborne pathogens in real time.
Not particle counts. Not proxies. The pathogens themselves, while they are still in the air.
The problem
The pathogen is airborne long before anyone knows.
Detection today is retrospective
Cultures and swabs answer in days. An airborne pathogen writes its outbreak curve in hours, and the answer arrives after the exposure has happened.
Air is the blind spot
Surfaces are wiped, hands are audited, water is sampled. The air in a critical zone is mostly assumed safe, because until now it could not be interrogated live.
Every undetected hour compounds
Ward closures, lost batches, investigations, liability: the cost of an airborne event scales with the time it stays invisible.
Why it is hard
Three constraints that have to be solved together.
Airborne detection is not a sensor problem. Each of these constrains the other two, which is why the work happens in one laboratory rather than across a supply chain.
The signal is vanishingly dilute
A consequential concentration of airborne pathogen is a handful of particles in a moving cubic metre. Capture has to concentrate that without destroying what it captures.
Real air is not test air
Occupied critical environments are full of biological and chemical background. Specificity in a clean chamber is not specificity in an ICU corridor at shift change.
Real time is the whole point
An answer in days already exists and is called a culture. The constraint that makes this a research problem is producing a defensible answer inside the window where a decision still changes the outcome.
The detection loop
From air to action, while it still matters.
01Capture
02Detect
03Confirm
04Act
01Capture
Continuous sampling of the air in the zones where an event would cost the most.
02Detect
Real-time identification of biological signals: the pathogens themselves, not surrogates.
03Confirm
Verification anchored in accredited laboratory methods, so a signal becomes defensible evidence.
04Act
Containment decisions and documentation while the window to act is still open.
The governance-level sequence of the Sentinel program. Engineering specifics are shared in a technical briefing, under the usual courtesies.
The regulatory context
Built where the rules are being written.
The publications co-authored with Johan Guns (UZ Brussel) opened the European debate on biological indoor-air standards. Sentinel is engineered to be the instrument those standards will require: real-time, auditable, validated by accredited laboratories. When the regulation lands, the reference technology should already exist.
Use cases
Where real time changes the outcome.
Intensive care units
Detect an airborne threat before it becomes a ward-level event.
Operating rooms
Continuous assurance during procedures, not a filter-change schedule.
Isolation rooms
Verify containment in real time instead of assuming it.
Pharmaceutical clean rooms
Catch biological deviations while a batch can still be saved.
Where Sentinel stands
We tell you exactly where this technology is.
Sentinel is in active development, with proof-of-concept deployments in hospitals on three continents. It is not yet a certified diagnostic device, and we will not describe it as one before it is. Stating the stage plainly is not modesty: a false availability promise, in this field, is dangerous.
Done
Method validated
Analytical approach validated with CREST / ULB
Now
Global POCs
6+ hospital deployments across 3 continents
Next
Clinical pilots
LOI conversions scheduled through 2026
Next
Certification path
Regulatory qualification alongside emerging EU standards
The scientists
Validated by people with reputations to lose.
Sentinel does not ask for trust. Its method is validated by the Board of Scientific Advisors, and every claim on this page traces to the public record.
Carlo Iorio
Head of CREST Lab, ULB
Leads the Belgian reference laboratory for indoor air quality. A long-term scientific validation partner: his accreditation underwrites the analytical methods inside AirShield.
Profiles and wording pending written sign-off by each advisor.
Go deeper
Three ways further in.
The laboratory
Where the capture, detection, and instrumentation work is done
The record
Grants, patents, publications, institutional partners, and the field deployments
AirShield
The layer already in the field, and the data it returns to the bench
A technical briefing, not a pitch.
Research institutions, clinical partners, and investors who want the engineering detail behind this page can ask for a briefing. It is given by the people who did the work, and it is limited by laboratory capacity rather than by a calendar.