Publications by authors named "Ortensia Vito"
Article Synopsis
- Diagnosing pediatric tuberculosis (TB) is complicated, but changes in host gene expression in blood can help identify biomarkers and improve understanding of the immune response in children with TB.* -
- The study involved stimulating blood samples from 102 children with confirmed TB, TB infection, pneumonia, and healthy controls, and analyzing the gene expression differences using microarrays.* -
- Researchers identified specific gene signatures that effectively distinguish TB from pneumonia, with high accuracy (AUC of 100% for one gene and 91.7% for a combination of two genes), paving the way for new diagnostic tests aligned with WHO standards.*
Background: Whole blood host transcript signatures show great potential for diagnosis of infectious and inflammatory illness, with most published signatures performing binary classification tasks. Barriers to clinical implementation include validation studies, and development of strategies that enable simultaneous, multiclass diagnosis of febrile illness based on gene expression.
Methods: We validated five distinct diagnostic signatures for paediatric infectious diseases in parallel using a single NanoString nCounter® experiment.
Article Synopsis
- Next-generation sequencing technologies and computational advances have enhanced our understanding of gene expression regulation, leading to increased interest in using transcriptomic biomarkers for disease diagnosis, prognosis assessment, and treatment prediction.
- Despite progress in identifying transcriptomic signatures, challenges such as patient variability and technical integration still complicate their use in standard clinical diagnostics.
- The article proposes a computational framework that accounts for cross-platform implementation constraints during signature discovery, aiming to facilitate the integration of RNA signatures from high-throughput technologies into nucleic acid amplification methods for clinical use.
Context: Studies comparing initial therapy for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) provided conflicting results.
Objective: To compare outcomes in MIS-C patients treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), glucocorticoids, or the combination thereof.
Data Sources: Medline, Embase, CENTRAL and WOS, from January 2020 to February 2022.
Diagnosis of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children by a Whole-Blood Transcriptional Signature.
J Pediatric Infect Dis Soc
June 2023
Background: To identify a diagnostic blood transcriptomic signature that distinguishes multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) from Kawasaki disease (KD), bacterial infections, and viral infections.
Methods: Children presenting with MIS-C to participating hospitals in the United Kingdom and the European Union between April 2020 and April 2021 were prospectively recruited. Whole-blood RNA Sequencing was performed, contrasting the transcriptomes of children with MIS-C (n = 38) to those from children with KD (n = 136), definite bacterial (DB; n = 188) and viral infections (DV; n = 138).
Background: Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a hyperinflammatory condition associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, has emerged as a serious illness in children worldwide. Immunoglobulin or glucocorticoids, or both, are currently recommended treatments.
Methods: The Best Available Treatment Study evaluated immunomodulatory treatments for MIS-C in an international observational cohort.
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 has highly variable clinical manifestations, ranging from asymptomatic infection through to life-threatening disease. Host whole blood transcriptomics can offer unique insights into the biological processes underpinning infection and disease, as well as severity. We performed whole blood RNA Sequencing of individuals with varying degrees of COVID-19 severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis (TB) in humans is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). It is estimated that 70 million children (<15 years) are currently infected with Mtb, with 1.2 million each year progressing to disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Evidence is urgently needed to support treatment decisions for children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) associated with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2.
Methods: We performed an international observational cohort study of clinical and outcome data regarding suspected MIS-C that had been uploaded by physicians onto a Web-based database. We used inverse-probability weighting and generalized linear models to evaluate intravenous immune globulin (IVIG) as a reference, as compared with IVIG plus glucocorticoids and glucocorticoids alone.