Infection? New "Universal" Diagnostic Test Can Identify Any of It

Feeling something strange in your body implies that you should be going to your physician to find out what's wrong. From there, a series of tests can be done to know if you have any infection or abnormality that causes you to feel disturbed. According to Freethink, experts run through tests such as blood samples or urine to determine the specific type of microbes or pathogens making that change in your body. These tests can be a little bit of a drag and uncomfortable and time-consuming.

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University of California San Francisco (UCSF) researchers industrialized a single diagnostic test that can search any sample for known pathogens' DNA. UCSF release added that the result from the said diagnostic test can be delivered in six hours regardless of the type or species or infectious agent or whether physicians know what the cause may be. 

According to WebMD, bacterial and viral infections have a lot in common, both caused by microbes and spread through coughing and sneezing, intimate contacts with people who have them, and contact with contaminated surfaces. Penn State Eberly College of Science defined a diagnostic test as any approach used in gathering clinical decisions. They added that examples of diagnostic tests include biopsies, pregnancy tests, medical histories, and results from a physical examination.

UCSF Department of Laboratory Medicine professor and director of the UCSF-Abbott Diagnostics and Discovery Center, Charles Chiu, MD, Ph.D., said that the advance in what they did is that they can detect any infection without special handling or processing for each different body fluids. He added that it is a small procedure.

How it works

The release added that traditional diagnostic tests are intended to detect only one or sometimes small panel of potential pathogens. They further said that with the new protocol, the clinicians do not need to have suspects in mind because the DNA-sequencing technology accounts for all the DNA in the sample, which may be from any species such as humans, bacterial, viral, parasitic, or fungal. They added that in identifying the match, the new test relies on an analytical software designed to compare DNA sequences present in the sample to massive genomic databases covering all known pathogens.

UCSF researchers in collaboration with Joe DeRisi, Ph.D. Steve Miller, MD, Ph.D., co-founders of Center for Next-Gen Precision, compared their new single protocol "metagenomic" DNA test to standard gold culture and standard PCR-based DNA tests through an analysis of body fluid from 160 patients and 144 of them are hospitalized. An analysis of the samples' release said that researchers used a pocket-sized sequencer by Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Illumina sequencing.

The release said that compared with gold standard culture and PCR, the researchers diagnosed 79 percent of bacteria and 91 percent of fungi infections using Illumina sequencing. On the other hand, in nanopore sequencing, 75 percent of bacteria and 91 percent of fungi conditions are detected. According to Dr. Chiu, the metagenomic test can replace all PCR-based DNA tests that are now being used in detecting hundreds of organisms that cannot be sufficiently cultured.

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