Marila Gennaro

Other : Rutgers University held IP

Rapid Analysis of Single T Cell Immunity Signatures in Tuberculosis

Successful intervention in many diseases is often severely limited by insufficient understanding of the complex underlying pathology. In particular, the ability to classify the disease stage and to elucidate a prognosis may be poor or even impossible when pathological changes are identifiable only in a small number of cells within a larger population. Here we propose to develop a new immunological test that can identify, from among persons carrying an asymptomatic infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (the bacteria that cause tuberculosis), those individuals progressing toward disease and becoming infectious. Two billion people (about one-third of the world's population) are currently infected with the TB bacteria, with the highest concentration of new cases in resource-poor areas of South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Even though 90-95% of infected persons do not become sick, the number of infected individuals is high enough to give rise to 8 million new cases of TB and almost 2 million deaths each year worldwide. Existing blood-based clinical immunodiagnostic assays recognize TB infection but are not geared to distinguish between asymptomatic infection and active disease. The latter is currently identified only when patients excrete TB bacilli while coughing or sneezing (it is estimated that, by the time of diagnosis, a person with active TB has already infected up to twenty contacts). Thus, for public health purposes, it is critical to diagnose active disease when the patient is still asymptomatic and non-infectious. We propose to develop a new, rapid test requiring small amounts of blood that detects tell-tale immune cell subpopulations distinguishing the relevant groups. The detection method in this test requires basic flow cytometry, a technique routinely utilized in the clinical diagnosis of immunopathologies and fully accessible to district/peripheral level clinical laboratories that currently operate a fluorescence microscope in resource-poor regions. Translation of the proposed diagnostic methodology to clinical practice will allow identification and treatment of early cases of TB, thus impeding transmission and helping eliminate TB. While the present proposal is directed to a specific set of end-users in TB clinics, the proposed assay has broad public health relevance, because the same principles and methodologies are directly applicable to any infectious and non-infectious disease that can be characterized based on the properties of single immune cells involved in the body's recognition of or response to a particular condition.