Two million people die each year from tuberculosis, many in undeveloped countries where diagnosis by the standard 100-year-old method of growing cultures can take weeks.
Meanwhile, those tested return home, potentially infecting those around them.
The World Health Organisation estimates $US1 billion ($NZ1.3 billion) is spent on Tb diagnostics each year.
Moves to develop the portable breath tester seem likely to go ahead if a planned six month-long testing programme for people with active Tb fulfills its promise in Bandung, Indonesia.
Bandung is a city of about four million people in Indonesia's West Java province.
Research by Prof Steve Chambers, a pathologist at Otago University's Christchurch campus, and Dr Mona Syhre has confirmed that consistent gaseous biomarkers are released into the breath from tuberculosis organisms.
Researchers are combining that knowledge with gas detection technology in human trials in Bandung.
The new test would be compared with standard diagnostic techniques.
"Our ideal is to have a highly portable instrument where you just say, 'Blow' and you get a yes or no on the spot, " Prof Chambers said.
The director of the university's centre for international health, Prof Philip Hill, said if the new test could perform as well as the existing method that took four weeks, "its great advantage" would be in delivering an immediate result, so that patients could start treatment straight away.
Prof Hill came into the project last year to help find a site where the test could be assessed.
The Bandung site has X-ray facilities and culture facilities, which many other Tb regions do not have.
A university research fellow, Merrin Rutherford, who has a master of public health degree from Otago, is working with Tb cases and their household contacts in Bandung.
Dr Alexandra Tickle, a commercialisation manager at Otago Innovation Ltd, the university's commercialisation arm, has already lined up investors for the breath-test product's future development.
Much work still had to be done, but the project was already sparking excitement, and recent testing in Papua New Guinea had proved positive, Dr Tickle said.
