Staff Report
UNM's Health Sciences Center has joined a national coalition to develop methods of detecting illnesses before symptoms develop.
The HSC, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have become part of a biosignatures consortium. The group is looking for patterns of certain proteins present in the body after a person is exposed to germs. If found, researchers could rapidly diagnose illnesses days after infection instead of waiting for symptoms to appear.
"If biosignatures can be found for specific diseases, they could be used in two ways," said Rick Lyons, associate professor for the School of Medicine's Department of Internal Medicine, in a news release. "The biosignatures could be used diagnostically to see if a person has been infected or to determine whether a patient is responding well to therapy or needs more aggressive treatment."
Researchers are testing body fluids and tissues to see if they show signs of a disease. They are also examining how specific the interaction is between humans and certain disease-causing bacteria.
Not only will the research be beneficial for public health concerns, but also for national security if a population was in danger of bioterrorism, said Fred Milanovich, LLNL project co-leader, in a news release.
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"Exactly the same techniques that would be used to look for bioterrorist pathogens can be used to detect emerging diseases," he said.
Each institution in the group has a different role.
UT's Southwestern Medical Center is capable of producing synthetic organisms to replicate diseases for research and has the ability to analyze hundreds of patients' tissues for disease.
"We had this vision of what was needed to do this, and Livermore's expertise in instrumentation and computation was essentially the missing piece and that's why we started this consortium," said Stephen Johnston, director of Center for Biomedical Inventions at UT.
He said those attributes make LLNL a perfect match for the health coalition.
UNM is doing its part by using animal models to better understand threatening agents. Its capabilities are well-known in infectious diseases.
Along with detecting illnesses early on, researchers also plan to focus on differentiating viral and bacterial infections.
The group's work is being financed by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant.
"What makes this effort different from other research programs is the comprehensive approach," Milanovich said.
