TB diagnostic technique wins international award
A Massey University genomics specialist has received an international award for developing a diagnostic technique for TB in Myanmar.
Massey Genome Service’s Mr Richard Fong received the award from Oxford Nanopore Technologies in the United Kingdom for utilising the company’s ‘MinION’ sequencer.
The bacterial genome enrichment technique developed by the team
is applied through the ‘MinION’ sequencing and
Illumina MiSeq technology, which is much faster, cheaper and
significantly smaller than earlier high throughput
sequencers.
Mr Fong says the technique used is able to reduce the time taken
to diagnose multidrug- or extensively drug-resistance strains of
TB, which the team hopes to apply in Myanmar.
“Faster treatment is possible because you can generate an
incredible amount of sequence data with ultra-long read lengths
in real time so that analysis can be performed onsite,” he
says.
Myanmar is one of 14 countries that is present in all three of
the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) lists for a high
burden of TB, TB/HIV, and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), with
an annual mortality rate of more than 26,000 cases per year and
9,000 new cases of MDR-TB per year.
Mr Fong says; “The award highlights the importance of New
Zealand research and its genomics capability in helping to
eradicate the world’s number one killer disease –
tuberculosis. If successful our novel approach will be a game
changer in the treatment of tuberculosis worldwide as it will
provide a much faster evaluation of drug resistance profile in
TB”.
The tool weighs less than 100 grams and plugs directly into a
laptop. It requires no additional computing equipment, which
makes it more suitable for on-site diagnosis so that patients
can get treatment fast.
Mr Fong is working alongside Professor Peter Lockhart of
Massey’s Institute of Fundamental Sciences, and Otago
University’s Myanmar research fellow, Dr Htin Lin Aung,
and Professor Gregory Cook.
Professor Cook says that “current diagnostic techniques
take six to eight weeks of laboratory time before medical
professionals know what drugs are going to work for the patient
and what will not.”
Both Mr Fong and Dr Aung will travel to Myanmar later this year
to test out the tool and protocols in the field.
The researchers are further discussing research collaboration
between New Zealand and Myanmar scientists. Dr Aung says he is
proud to be involved in this research project that could benefit
his home country and New Zealand.
The team hopes that the techniques being developed might also be
applied to other priority infectious diseases such as HIV,
influenza and malaria.
Source:
Massey University
