United States: A new test which is developed at UC San Francisco can quickly detect almost like any kind of germ, like viruses, bacteria, fungi, or parasites. After 10 years of use, it has proven to be very successful.
This test can actually help doctors treat infections which is in the brain, like meningitis and encephalitis, and it can also spot new viruses that could cause pandemics. It works using a special method called metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS).
This is different from searching for a single pathogen at a time; mNGS characterizes all nucleic acids – RNA and DNA – in a sample.
As reported by the UCSF, “It is not a complicated piece of technology,” said Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, a professor of laboratory medicine and infectious diseases at UCSF and the senior author of the paper.
“I think, by consolidating those numerous tests to one, we can remove a lot of time-consuming speculation in cases of infections diagnosing and treating,”
The researchers initially designed a clinical mNGS test to assess the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the relatively uncontaminated liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.
This test has since been done on thousands of patients with acute undiagnosed neurological complaints – either at UCSF, or other similar institutions nationwide.
In a paper published on Nov. 12 in Nature Medicine, the team showed that using the mNGS test helps to identify 86% of neurological infections.
The team also used mNGS in a companion study published the same day in Nature Communications, to identify pathogens in respiratory fluid that can cause pneumonia and automate the process to get results faster.
This they believe, will enable the automated test to identify other viral pathogen which may lead to respiratory pandemics such as COVID 19.