Study cases

ISIT-TB

Detect active TB cases, diagnose & monitor treatment of patients using blood based-RNA biomarkers

Cloud tag

Background

Blood-based biomarkers are urgently needed to help diagnose tuberculosis and monitor treatment of infected patients

Challenges

Active pulmonary TB diagnosis requires culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which may take up to 6 weeks. The GeneXpert MTB/RIF automated

molecular test for M. tuberculosis results in more rapid diagnosis but still requires sputum, which can be difficult to obtain from women and children resulting too often in empirical treatment

Solution

BIOASTER collaborated with bioMérieux, the Francis Crick Institute in London and  the University of Leicester to demonstrate the feasibility of using blood-based RNA biomarkers of TB

  1. to differentiate active tuberculosis patients from healthy and asymptomatic latently infected individuals
  2. to monitor tuberculosis treatment and predict therapy outcome

Results

Using RNA-Seq and targeted PCR, we have identified and validated in an independent cohort, a blood transcriptional signature that can discriminates active tuberculosis from latently infected and healthy individuals.

Furthermore, we have shown that this blood transcriptomic signature can predict treatment outcome of TB patients.

Tabone O. et al. Blood transcriptomics reveal the evolution and resolution of the immune response in tuberculosis.
J. Exp Med 2021, 218; 10

Singhania A. et al. A modular transcriptional signature identifies phenotypic heterogeneity of human tuberculosis infection.
Nature Communications 2018, 9:2308

Outlook

Future diagnostic tests based on blood transcriptomic signatures will benefit from the outcome of this project. The TB-signature is ready to be deployed on a commercial PCR platform and validated on the field