Wikimedia Commons Sample containing Hansen’s disease bacteria: an innovative methodWikimedia Commons
A new method that could potentially be used in the diagnosis of Hansen’s disease – an infectious and chronic affliction caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae –, without requiring a biopsy of affected tissues, has been developed by researcher Estela de Oliveira Lima during her doctoral studies at the Innovare Biomarkers Laboratory, affiliated with the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Campinas (Unicamp). “The diagnosis is currently made through a skin lesion biopsy,” explains Estela Lima, who conducted her project in collaboration with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The problem is that the bacteria usually take a very long time to proliferate, and if patients are not diagnosed early, they may transmit the disease to others. By the new method, for which a patent has already been filed, a 1 square centimeter silica plate is lightly pressed onto the patient’s skin, even before any lesions have become apparent. The molecules imprinted onto the plate are extracted with methanol and analyzed in a high-resolution mass spectrometer. “We conducted statistical analyses comparing samples from patients with those of healthy volunteers, and we saw that each group had a different assemblage of molecules,” says Lima.
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