Gene profiles of children with severe Staphylococcus aureus infections have been mapped, according to a revelation by Infectious disease specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
This revelation is believed to offer a critical insight into how the human immune system gets programmed when it comes to responding to this pathogen and opening new doors for improved therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Monica Ardura, instructor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study available online in PLoS One, the Public Library of Science’s online journal noted that the first description has been provided in terms of a pattern of response within the immune system of an individual that has seen to be very consistent, very reproducible and very intense.
From News-Medical.net:
Researchers used blood samples collected between 2001 and 2005 from 77 children - 53 hospitalized at Children’s Medical Center Dallas with invasive S aureus infections and 24 controls. The control samples were collected from healthy children attending either well-child clinic or undergoing elective surgical procedures. Children with underlying chronic diseases, immunodeficiency, multiple infections, and those who received steroids or other immunomodulatory therapies were excluded from the study.
The children ranged in age from a few months to 15 years and included 43 boys and 34 girls. Those with S aureus infections - both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) - were matched with healthy controls for age, sex and race. The researchers also characterized the extent as well as the type of infection in each patient to make sure that the strain of bacteria didn’t influence the results.
Dr. Ardura stressed that more research is needed because the results represent a one-time snapshot of what’s going on in the cell during an invasive staphylococcal infection.
The researchers associated with this study pinpointed how immune system responds to an S aureus infection at the genetic level. The finding was based on the fact that gene expression profiling is a process that concludes how genes of an individual get activated or suppressed in response to the infection.
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