Diagnostic test can mine the immune system for disease clues

A professor at a California university says he has developed a diagnostic method that can reveal conditions thought to have environmental triggers. By decoding an individual's immune system on a molecular level, the method can demystify, diagnose and provide insight into conditions like celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, pre-eclampsia and schizophrenia, says University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher Patrick Daugherty. The process works by mining an individual's immunological memory, a catalog of the pathogens and antigens encountered by their immune system, he said in a university release Thursday. "Every time you encounter a pathogen, you mount an immune response," Daugherty said, that forms antibodies that are specific to the antigens, and creates "memory cells" that are activated by subsequent encounters with the antigen. "The trick is to determine which antibodies are linked to specific diseases," Daugherty said. To sort through perhaps tens of thousands of antibody molecules present in a person's blood, the researchers mix a sample of a subject's blood containing the antibody molecules with billions of different peptides. "All the keys associate with their preferred lock," Daugherty said. "The peptides that can bind to an antibody, do so." These antibody/peptide pairs can be linked to a particular disease, he said. "We have two goals," Daugherty, a researcher with the university's Center for BioEngineering, said. "We want to identify diagnostic tests for diseases where there are no blood diagnostics ... and we want to figure out what might have given rise to these diseases."