Thursday, March 28

Ural scientists are developing a new type of test system that will help diagnose diseases at an early stage

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Ural scientists are developing a new type of test system that will help diagnose diseases at an early stage. It will track significant changes in immunity by blood biomarkers (they show the state of the metabolome of the intestinal microbiota). According to the developers, there are no such systems today, specialists in different countries are working on its creation. Analogs operate on different principles and are more difficult to apply. Hospitals, diagnostic centers, R&D centers of pharmaceutical corporations may be interested in the new technology, the developers believe.

“We believe that our test system will simplify and reduce the cost of diagnosing immunodeficiency conditions in the early stages. The analysis will be based on specific blood plasma biomarkers identified by chromatographic peaks. Biomarkers will be selected among lipids, amino acids and vitamins found in blood plasma. They are metabolites of the intestinal flora, which undergoes changes as a result of the occurrence of adverse conditions in the body. Such an analysis will allow not only to detect the presence of the disease at an early stage, but also to choose a personal treatment and optimal targeted therapy. Among other things, the analysis will require a minimum amount of blood,” says the head of the study, Professor of the Department of Organic Synthesis Technology of UrFU Elena Kovaleva.

The new test system is based on high-performance liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS). This method will determine specific microbial markers in the blood, the number of which depends on both the type of disease itself and the severity of its course, the researchers explain.

At the first stage, the system was tested on laboratory animals. Mice were injected with a drug that reduced the immunity of animals, and using HPLC-MS, scientists tracked how the number of microbiota biomarkers changed: fatty acids, glycerolipids, phospholipids, etc. The next step is to find a correlation of these identified biomarkers with those for humans. In general, the researchers plan to develop software and use supercomputers and machine learning to analyze a large amount of data in order to eventually obtain more accurate results.

“Our system will require minimal costs for sample preparation and, we believe, will provide a reliable analysis of the content of individual lipids, amino acids and vitamins as microbial markers of blood. With the help of a neural network, the analysis will be carried out on more than 10,000 molecular markers,” concludes Elena Kovaleva.

The scientists also plan to patent the development and attract interested businesses to the project. The developers expect to create a prototype of the device by 2025 and by 2027 to complete the development of the technology and enter the market with it.

It should be noted that specialists of the scientific, educational and Innovative Center for Chemical and Pharmaceutical Technologies of the UrFU Institute of Chemical Technology, the Institute of Immunology and Physiology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Research Institute of Viral Infections “Virom” of Rospotrebnadzor are working on the creation of the system.

Reference

The human microbiota contains bacteria, fungi, viruses that live in the human body — these are hundreds of billions of microorganisms in the nose, mouth, skin, eyes, lungs, etc. The microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract (its mass is about 2 kg) plays a particularly important role. It is important for the normal functioning of the intestinal immune system; it receives resources for metabolism from our food and participates in the process of digesting food.

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