韦恩州立大学获NIH资助开发用于诊断婴幼儿感染的新型PCR技术

  近日，美国国立卫生研究院计划资助韦恩州立大学研究者一项长达5年的研究计划，用于开发进行发热婴幼儿感染诊断的基于PCR的新型检测技术平台。
  据估计，每年在美国有大约50万发热婴幼儿会住进医院的急诊室，而其中大约10%的患儿都患有侵袭性的细菌感染(Invasive bacterial infection)，比如菌血症或脑膜炎；然而当前诊断这些患者的方法通常都是侵入性的，而且会导致经验性抗生素的过度使用以及不必要的入院治疗。
  为了解决这一问题，在NIH的资助下，韦恩州立大学的研究者Prashant Mahajan及其同事开展了一项研究，用于开发基于血液的RNA特性分析检测盘，这或将用于诊断发热婴幼儿的分离细菌及病毒感染，以及合并感染。
  随后研究者将在能够进行细菌感染评估的前瞻性、多中心发热婴幼儿研究中心，利用新型快速的PCR平台对这种新型检测盘进行验证证实；NIH这项资助计划开始于8月21日，每年给研究者资助140万美元。（转化医学网360zhyx.com）
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NIH Funds Effort to Develop PCR Test to Diagnose Infections in Infants
The National Institutes of Health has recently awarded a Wayne State University researcher a five-year grant to develop a PCR-based platform for the diagnosis of infections in febrile infants.

An estimated 500,000 febrile infants are admitted to emergency departments annually in the US, around 10 percent of which will have an invasive bacterial infection such as bacteremia or meningitis, according to the grant's abstract. Current methods for diagnosing these patients, however, are often invasive and can lead to the overuse of empirical antibiotics and unnecessarily hospitalizations.

To address this unmet need, and with the support of the NIH funding, Wayne State's Prashant Mahajan and colleagues are working to establish a panel of blood-based RNA signatures used to diagnose isolated bacterial and viral infections, as well as co-infections, in febrile infants.

The panel will then be validated using a novel and rapid PCR platform in a prospective, multi-center, cross-sectional study of febrile infants under evaluation for bacterial infections.

The grant project began on August 21, and is worth $1.4 million in its first year.