Fungal Infection Identified by Pathogen Detection Array Technology

The technology contains 60,000 probes that simultaneously test for all known viruses, as well as a variety of bacteria, fungi, helminths, and protozoa.

The investigators applied the PathoChip test to tissue samples of a patient with relapsed acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). The patient, a middle-aged man, had undergone chemotherapy for the cancer, a treatment that is well known to weaken the immune system, increasing susceptibility to infection. As a result, he developed an unknown fungal infection. The team rapidly identified a zygomycetous fungus, Rhizomucor, an otherwise challenge for the clinical laboratories, predominantly in the patient with acute myelogenous leukemia.

Erle Robertson, PhD, a professor and vice-chair for research in Otorhinolaryngology, said, “We've run many tests to see if we could identify pathogens in the laboratory, just to see if the PathoChip has efficacy in identifying a variety of organisms, and we were able to identify all infectious agents tested, but this was the first time we actually looked directly at a patient sample to identify a pathogenic agent. With this technology, out of 60,000 possibilities and probes that we used, in a little over 24 hours we were able to identify this particular fungi.” The study was published originally online on November 20, 2015, in the journal Cancer, Biology & Therapy.

Related Links:
University of Pennsylvania