Digital serology for parallel parasitic disease detection

拟议的项目旨在建立一种慢性克氏t型虫感染和恰加斯病的诊断测试，这种测试不仅可以提高测试性能，而且可以很容易地与针对大多数临床重要寄生虫的类似开发的测试相结合。目前针对恰加斯病和其他寄生虫感染的检测方法缺乏理想的特异性水平，需要多种独立的检测方法和检测格式。因此，对单个标本进行几种不同的临床上重要寄生虫病的检测变得成本高昂且耗时，延误了疾病的检测和治疗。我们建议通过创建一个单一的、一体化的诊断测试来解决这个问题，该测试能够检测到十种或更多不同的临床上重要的寄生虫病。重要的是，拟议的战略可以扩展到几乎任意数量的传染病，而不会导致最终检测成本的增加。

The proposed project aims to build a diagnostic test for chronic T. cruzi infection and Chagas disease that not only improves testing performance but that can be readily integrated with similarly developed tests for most clinically important parasitoses. Current assays for Chagas disease, and other parasitic infections, lack desired levels of specificity, and require multiple independent assays and testing formats. Consequently, testing a single specimen for several different clinically important parasitic diseases becomes cost prohibitive and time consuming, delaying disease detection and treatment. We propose to address this problem by creating a single, all-in-one diagnostic test able to detect ten or more different clinically important parasitic diseases. Importantly, the proposed strategy could be expanded to a nearly arbitrary number of infectious diseases without resultant increases in final test cost. Towards a multiplexed parasitic disease test, we will first create an improved test for Chagas disease, that impacts about 350,000 individuals in the US, and 8 million in the Americas. To accomplish this, we will apply bacterial display peptide libraries, next-generation sequencing, and computational bioinformatics to identify a set of motifs and consensus peptides corresponding to antigenic peptide epitopes that when combined yield optimal sensitivity and specificity values in the discovery set. The motif and peptide panels will be validated using an independent specimen set. Assay reproducibility and stability will be measured. This project may thus lead to clinically useful tests to improve the rates of detection parasitic diseases their resultant complications.