Breathing new life into malaria detection

Australian scientists have made a significant discovery that could lead to a simple and quick “breath test” for malaria

Researchers at CSIRO, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the Australian National University are working on tests for diagnosing malaria by identifying distinctive chemicals that can be detected in the breath of patients infected with the disease.

They looked at the breath of volunteers, who had been given a controlled malaria infection as part of existing studies to develop new treatments, and found that the levels of some normally almost undetectable chemicals increased markedly in the breath of the volunteers during the malaria infection.

“What is exciting is that the increase in these chemicals were present at very early stages of infection, when many other methods would have been unable to detect the parasite in the body of people infected with malaria,” Dr Stephen Trowell, Research Group Leader at CSIRO said.

“In addition to its potentially better sensitivity, human breath offers an attractive alternative to blood tests for diagnosing malaria.”

The study, published today in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, was conducted in two independent studies where experimental drug treatments were being tested in volunteers who had been given a very small dose of infection.

Using a sophisticated analytical instrument, the researchers identified four sulphur-containing compounds whose levels varied across the time course of the malaria infection.

“The sulphur-containing chemicals had not previously been associated with any disease and their concentrations changed in a consistent pattern over the course of the malaria infection,” Professor James McCarthy, Senior Scientist in Clinical Tropical Medicine at QIMR Berghofer said.

“Their levels were correlated with the severity of the infection and effectively disappeared after they were cured. Malaria continues to place a huge health and economic burden on many of the poorest people in the world.”

In an interesting twist, researchers detected foul-smelling compounds – albeit at levels far too low for humans to smell – in the breath of people with malaria.

Up to now, these chemicals have only been detected using very expensive, laboratory based instruments, and only in the breath of volunteers experiencing a controlled malaria infection in the clinic.

“Now we are collaborating with researchers in regions where malaria is endemic, to test whether the same chemicals can be found in the breath of patients,” Dr Trowell said.

“We are also working with colleagues to develop very specific, sensitive and cheap ‘biosensors’ that could be used in the clinic and the field to test breath for malaria.”

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