Tony Hu, PhD, is the Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Biotechnology Innovation and director of the Center of Cellular and Molecular Diagnosis at Tulane University School of Medicine. Courtesy of Paula Burch-Celentano
Led by Tony Hu, the Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Biotechnology Innovation at Tulane University School of Medicine, researchers at Tulane, Baylor College of Medicine and NanoPin Technologies, Inc. are now developing a rapid, reliable and highly specific test to allow rapid diagnosis of all forms of Tuberculosis (TB), the leading worldwide cause of death from infectious disease.
More than 10 million people contract TB each year, and the disease kills 1.7 million people annually. Efforts to control the global TB epidemic have had limited success, due to failure to identify and treat a majority of the individuals with active TB disease and partly because of the relatively poor ability of current diagnostic tests to recognize certain TB disease manifestations.
This research effort is being funded with a $3.8 million grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity office through the Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program in the Department of Defense to address health threats to military men and women deployed to overseas battlefields and on humanitarian missions.
Bacterial culture is still commonly used to diagnose TB and to identify drug-resistant TB cases in much of the world. However, bacterial culture tests can take several weeks to provide a final result and are unable to detect a substantial fraction of individuals with active TB disease, delaying the decision to start and end anti-TB treatments.
More recently developed molecular tests can reduce the time required for TB diagnosis, but also exhibit poor ability to detect certain manifestations of TB disease and are not useful in monitoring patient responses to anti-TB therapy.
“Our test has several advantages over currently existing TB tests, including the gold-standard of bacterial culture,” says Hu. “It requires only a small blood sample and directly measures TB-derived proteins to detect all forms of TB disease, including those missed by most other available TB tests. Notably, this approach can discriminate TB cases from those caused by related pathogens that produce similar symptoms but require different treatments.”
Hu’s test also indicates the severity of the infection and its response to treatment, using a streamlined approach suitable for high-throughput operation in clinical settings. This test uses equipment already approved by the FDA for other assays but can also be run on portable instruments suitable for use in resource-limited or extreme settings encountered during military and humanitarian missions.
Hu’s team has performed multiple pre-clinical studies with this method and is now partnering with researchers at Baylor and NanoPin Technologies, Inc. to screen the diagnostic performance of this test in a large population of patients with and without active TB using both FDA-approved equipment and a new portable system, and develop an optimized test kit suitable for regulatory approval.
“The company will standardize the production pipeline,” says Hu. “This will be highly translational if we’re successful.”
The U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity, 839 Chandler Street, Fort Detrick MD 21702-5014 is the awarding and administering acquisition office. This work was supported by the The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs endorsed by the Department of Defense through the FY18 Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program/Technology/Therapeutic Development Research Award under Award No. W81XWH18PRMRPTTDA. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense. In the conduct of research involving hazardous organisms or toxins, the investigators adhere to the CDC-NIH Guide for Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories.
Source: Tulane University
I always spent my half an hour to read this webpage’s articles everyday along with a cup of coffee.
Hey I know this is off topic but I was wondering if you knew of any widgets I could add to my blog that automatically tweet my newest twitter updates. I’ve been looking for a plug-in like this for quite some time and was hoping maybe you would have some experience with something like this. Please let me know if you run into anything. I truly enjoy reading your blog and I look forward to your new updates.
We stumbled over here coming from a different web page and thought I might as well check things out. I like what I see so now i’m following you. Look forward to looking over your web page again.
Great post.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on %meta_keyword%. Regards
I’ve read several good stuff here. Definitely value bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how much attempt you put to create one of these wonderful informative web site.
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You definitely know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
Magnificent goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you’re just too wonderful. I really like what you’ve acquired here, really like what you’re stating and the way in which you say it. You make it entertaining and you still take care of to keep it smart. I cant wait to read far more from you. This is actually a great site.
Actually no matter if someone doesn’t know after that its up to other viewers that they will help, so here it occurs.
Great info. Lucky me I found your website by accident (stumbleupon). I have book-marked it for later!
You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post, I will try to get the hang of it!
I got this site from my friend who told me about this website and now this time I am visiting this web site and reading very informative articles here.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on %meta_keyword%. Regards
Hi to every body, it’s my first pay a visit of this weblog; this webpage contains awesome and truly good stuff designed for readers.
It’s very easy to find out any topic on net as compared to books, as I found this piece of writing at this website.
Hi there everyone, it’s my first visit at this website, and post is actually fruitful for me, keep up posting these articles or reviews.