Project
Evolving Landscape of Fungal Diagnostics by Using New Sampling Tool and P4 Medicine Platform for Prediction, Prevention, Participation, and Personalization
About two billion people suffer from fungal infections (FI), majority of them are usually chronic and long lasting. In addition, in some medical settings fungi may cause huge problem including complications and death. Fungal pathogenicity is complex involving a diversity of mechanisms and pathways but biofilm formation seems curtail for chronic disease form and failure of therapy.
Several common fungal agents are responsible for chronic or severe forms of disease but they are usually hard to detect by traditional testing. Sampling methods based on skin or mucosa surface swabbing is non standardized and quality of sample is pure and non measureable. In all human the skin and mucosa are home of fungi which usually exist as a plankton cells and comprise the micobiota. In case of positive fungal finding fungal micobiota makes the difference between colonization and infections difficult. In addition, proper interpretation of positive results depends on patient’s settings and risks and therefore P4 medicine concept based on prediction, prevention, participation, and personalization could be state-of-the-art approach.
To meet these challenges in medical mycology more precise, simple, acceptable and user-friendly oriented tools which may improve sampling quality and accuracy of laboratory diagnosis and the risk oriented questionnaire with the active participation of the patient supporting personalization are key pillars. It may allow the comprehensive comparative laboratory analyses with personalization, differentiation of fungal pathogen from mycobiome, and proper prediction of infection, disease severity and outcomes. All this is promising for development of P4 Clinical Mycology as a new health service model for the 21st century. Since the majority of fungal diseases are unsuspected, undetected and untreated the personalized diagnosis of FI enable screening and fungal cases finding, providing better support to people avoiding illness and death.
We established new methods to obtain valid tissue samples from the skin, mucous membranes or nail by using cell abrasion, direct to vial collection and liquid cell quantification. The tool is linked with the software questioner and the platform that enables estimation of patient risk score (low, medium or high risk). All this allows patients easy and proper sampling, timely suspicion, proper diagnosis and successful treatment of FI. It will promotes the ‘out-of-laboratory’ testing.