A Rapid Test for Interferon alpha To Screen Viral from Bacterial Infections

Establishing interferon-a as a surrogate marker of viral infection will enable the differential diagnosis of viral vs bacterial infections. Such information will be critical to subsequent treatments. The current proposal is designed to evaluate CytImmune Science's patent pending technology for cytokine measurement in biological fluids. The technology overcomes the presence of cytokine binding proteins in biological fluids, which mask their detection by sandwich immunoassays. The assay system is a competitive binding immunoassay, which relies upon the competition of a cytokine ligand with standard or unknown for antibody binding. The bound cytokine ligand couples to an enzyme, which is detected by the enzymatic conversion of a chromagen. This competitive binding reaction results in an inverse relationship between amount of color and the amount of analyte. A key element of the present proposal is measuring clinical samples from virally-infected vs bacterially- infected patients, and determining IFNa levels with a laboratory-based assay system. Secondly, the proposal then seeks to extend this laboratory-based technology to a hand-held field assay system. The goal of Phase I is to initiate studies to show the equivalency of the semi-quantitative field test with the quantitative laboratory test.