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Disease ‘fingerprints’ used to track common infections in children
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Researchers at UT Southwestern Children’s Medical Center, Dallas, and Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, Dallas, recently found a new method to identify certain viruses and bacteria which cause some of the most common infections in children (Blood. 2007;109:2066-2077).
“We are genetically programmed to respond differently to different infections. We have now developed the tools to understand that,” Octavio Ramilo, MD, professor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern, said in a press release. “Infectious diseases are the number one cause of death in the world. So we hope this eventually can be used not only to diagnose, but also to understand the prognosis and how the body is responding to therapy.”
The researchers extracted RNA from a drop of blood and placed it on a microarray. Gene expression patterns in leukocytes were then analyzed from 29 children who were known to have one of a number of common infections: influenza, Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli.
Researchers also analyzed 35 genes that are known to help distinguish infections and identify infectious agents with better-than-average success rates. Physicians were able to distinguish between the influenza, E. coli and streptococcal infections in about 95% of cases. A different set of genes distinguished E. coli from staph infections with an 85% accuracy. Further investigation demonstrated clear distinction between viral and bacterial pneumonias.
The next step will be to decide whether the microarray analysis can be applied in a more challenging clinical setting, according to the researchers.
“When a child comes in with a fever to the emergency room, we want to see if we can predict which ones just have a virus and are able to go home and who needs to be admitted and put into the intensive care unit and treated with antibiotics. This is our goal, it’s just the first step but it establishes a basis for us to do that,” Ramilo said in a press release.
Pediatricians are unable to perform the analysis in their offices, but researchers are already thinking about a possible way they could send in the results from the chip and get the analysis back via the internet, for example.
“This could change the way we do things,” Ramilo said in a press release.