State Company Involved In Global Effort | A team of biotech experts have discovered a new genetic technology that identifies killer virus
A team of scientists recently unveiled a playbook in the fight against infectious disease outbreaks: Genetic mapping by computers to find bugs that slip past other medical tests.
The process, experts say, should facilitate much faster responses to deadly outbreaks.
The team, which included experts from a Branford, Conn.-company called 454 Life Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and academic researchers from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, eventually found one molecule of evidence inside a cell that most likely came from rodent urine in Yugoslavia.
“There is no doubt that this technology is going to play a major role in our defenses,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The coordinated global response, he says, showed “the way it should work” when a new killer bug emerges.
Fauci and other experts are particularly concerned about the threat of a pandemic as cases of bird flu mount around the world.
“This is new technology that has spectacular power,” he says. “It’s extraordinary in its capability and it was manifested in a very dramatic case.” Details are to be published next month in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Faced with a mysterious cluster of deaths in Australia in April, scientists there looked for viruses and bacteria that might have infected the women, ages 44 to 64, who had received transplanted organs from the same donor.
After several weeks of work, they came up empty because the virus was new and invisible to tests.
They then sought help from infectious disease experts in the United States, who turned to the computerized genetic-sequencing tools that have mapped the human genome, a map of the body’s DNA.
Finding A Killer
When the standard methods for hunting viruses and bacteria failed to identify the women’s killer bug, the U.S. team used RNA, ribonucleic acid, from a donated liver and a donated kidney from two of the women to create a genetic sequence library.
Using bioinformatics tools, including a computer algorithm, scientists were able to spot 14 sequences that looked like evidence of an arenavirus, which often passes to humans in rodent urine.
The team found that the transplant patients had died from a new strain of arenavirus.
Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health and one of the study authors, says the same method can now be used to respond faster to everyday problems, ranging from pneumonia to diarrhea, as well as the global pandemic threat.
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