Novel metabolomics approach for the diagnosis of infectious diseases

Tests to determine whether an individual has a disease or not are often expensive and performed on complex instruments in laboratories. As such, there is currently an important unmet need for tests to diagnose infectious diseases with highly accurate, inexpensive and simple methods that could be performed nearer to the patient.

We have developed a method that can identify the metabolites (small molecules) that change in response to infection. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrated its successful use for the highly accurate detection of respiratory viruses directly from swabs taken from the nasopharynx (upper part of the throat behind the nose).

We now aim to expand this method to a new testing instrument at the BC Centre for Disease Control and assess its test performance for the detection of other infectious diseases like human papillomavirus (HPV) and tuberculosis (TB). Identification of a limited set of metabolites for each condition will enable the adaptation of the method to a simpler, near-patient diagnostic test. Such a test has the potential to reduce the time it takes to obtain an accurate diagnosis and improve clinical outcomes at a population level.