Description:
Dr. Chen developed a technology that can be used to greatly enrich pathogenic sequences in human clinical samples. This method does not require prior knowledge of the pathogen or assumption of the infection, and therefore, provides a fast and sequence-independent approach to identify human pathogens.
In combination with Illumina next generation sequencing (NGS) system, this technology can significantly reduce the cost per clinical sample and can be widely used in clinical laboratories for the detection of human viral pathogens such as HIV, HCV, influenza virus, etc. This pathogen detection technology uses a set of small “non-human primers” that do not match the most abundant human transcripts. Instead of using random primers in the construction of cDNA library, the method recruits these short non-human primers, which in turn, is able to preferentially amplify all non-human (presumably pathogenic) sequences.
Using this method, Dr. Chen is able to enrich pathogenic sequences up to 200 fold in the final sequencing library. The pathogenic sequences can further enriched by subtractive hybridization against reference human transcripts. The method, coupled with NGS technology, can be broadly used in research or clinical diagnostic laboratories in the detection of known pathogens as well as identification of unknown pathogens. Currently, two viral detection kits are being developed. HCV Detection Kit for Illumina® Sequencing and Influenza Virus Detection Kit for Illumina® Sequencing.