Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a new super virus test that can detect all kinds of known virus that can infect man and animals.
In the press release given by the University, the study's senior author, Gregory Storch, MD along with Ruth L. Siteman, a Professor of Pediatrics, said that with use of the new test, doctors are going to detect the virus affecting their patients, even if they don't know what they are looking for.
The discovery of the new test is a great leap in modern medical history. Nowadays, doctors will need to run a massive amount of tests just to find out what kind of virus is causing your illness. It is like searching for a needle in a haystack without even knowing what kind of needle you are searching for.
"It casts a broad net and can efficiently detect viruses that are present at very low levels. We think the test will be especially useful in situations where a diagnosis remains elusive after standard testing, or in situations in which the cause of a disease outbreak is unknown," said Storch.
The study published at Genome Research states that the new super virus test 'ViroCap' is "designed to enrich nucleic acid from DNA and RNA viruses from 34 families that infect vertebrate hosts. A computational approach condensed nearly 1 billion base pair (bp) of viral reference sequence into less than 200 million bp of unique, representative sequence suitable for targeted sequence capture."
Their experimental research study has noted that 'ViroCap' could be used to detect viral sequences with up to 58 percent variation from the references used to select capture probes.
The research process and procedures used during the study was made available for the public, as well as was given to other researchers and scientists for them to explore more on the potential usage of the new test.
The 'ViroCap' super virus test will need to run through diverse clinical trials first to be able to prove its effectiveness, therefore it might take years before the new revolutionary test will be put into real action.
