Host-Pathogen Interactions and Disease Biomarkers Discovery
Host-pathogen interaction is important to establish infection and it involves a complex set of processes. Cross talks between the host and pathogen via various modes happen during the early stage of disease establishment. These cross talks will help in pathogen to deceive the host immune system and ten gradually establish in host and then create the disease. In other instances, the host may use these early cross talks to identify pathogen and use the immune defense mechanism to get rid of the pathogen preventing the disease. A growing interest is there in capturing these early cross talks as biomarkers to identify pathogens, diseases, developing therapies and drugs that target these interactions. Extracellular vesicles are known to involved in intra-cellular communication and even communication between different species belong to different kingdoms. Moreover, use of non- or less-invasive sampling to perform the diagnostic tests becoming very popular however, most of the existing routine diagnostics methods do not meet the sensitivity to make efficient and accurate diagnosis. Thus, analysis of EVs from human and animals using non- or less- invasive liquid or other biopsy samples coupled with latest metagenomics may pave a novel way of understanding the earliest communication between the host and the pathogen and there by detecting the disease inception and progression. Moreover, the analysis of EV cargo may help in identifying novel vaccine candidates to promote preventive or prophylactic treatments. Specially, understanding the host-pathogen interactions can be easily translated to another species of interest specially in zoonotic diseases enabling timely interventions. Under this research theme, COMBVET ERA chair is committed to device novel EV enrichment and characterization techniques in order to identify zoonotic disease and other microbial disease conditions in both animals and human following the comparative biomedicine, one health and systems biology principles.
