A recent collaboration between Professor Guan Bo-ou's team from the School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering at Jinan University and Professor Zhang Hong's team from the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University has made significant progress in the early detection of invasive fungal infections, reducing the detection time from 24 hours to 30 minutes. Their findings have been published in Advanced Materials.
Invasive fungal infections, with candidiasis as a representative, have a high mortality rate. Statistics show that globally, 13 million people are infected each year, resulting in 2 million deaths. In response to this disease, the World Health Organization has for the first time issued a list of super fungi threatening humans, advocating for "early diagnosis and treatment." Blood culture is currently the gold standard for clinical diagnosis but is limited by long reporting times, leading to treatment delays. This situation is even more severe in areas with poor medical conditions. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate, efficient, and economically friendly early bedside detection technologies.
Researchers, combining medical and engineering expertise, have tackled the clinical challenges of detecting invasive fungal infections by proposing long-period fiber grating sensors with nano-plasma interface sensitization. By controlling the refractive index-sensitive range and enhancing the evanescent field energy, they achieved early detection of biomarkers for invasive fungal infections.
This sensor demonstrates high specificity and sensitivity (detection limit of approximately 10-12 mg/mL) for the biomarker 1-3-β-glucose (BDG) associated with invasive fungi. It accurately measured BDG levels in both small animal models and clinical blood samples, showing high consistency with established clinical methods (correlation coefficient of 0.963). The sensor effectively distinguishes negative and positive cases, providing early warnings for potential patients.
This achievement reduces the detection time for fungal infections from 24 hours to 30 minutes, providing critical time for timely antifungal therapy in clinical settings and alleviating the suffering caused by delayed diagnosis in remote and impoverished areas.
This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation, the National Key R&D Program, the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation, the Guangdong Provincial Special Support Program for Local Teams, and the Guangzhou Municipal University Joint Fund, among others.
For more information, please refer to the related paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202312985.
