After collecting blood samples over the course of two years from healthy individuals who were infected with Mtb, investigators from the University of Cape Town in South Africa were able to single out gene expression patterns that differed between individuals from the study who remained healthy and those who ultimately developed TB infections.
“Our results, showing that blood-based signatures in healthy individuals can predict progression to active tuberculosis disease, pave the way for the establishment of diagnostic methods that are scalable and inexpensive,” the authors concluded. “An important first step would be to test whether the signature can predict tuberculosis disease in the general population, rather than the select populations included in this project.”
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