DNA test can quickly identify pneumonia in patients with severe COVID-19, aiding faster treatment - EurekAlert

Researchers have developed a DNA test to quickly identify secondary infections in COVID-19 patients, who have double the risk of developing pneumonia while on ventilation than non-COVID-19 patients.

However, these patients are susceptible to further infections from bacteria and fungi that they may acquire while in hospital - so called 'ventilator-associated pneumonia'.

Now, a team of scientists and doctors at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, led by Professor Gordon Dougan, Dr Vilas Navapurkar and Dr Andrew Conway Morris, have developed a simple DNA test to quickly identify these infections and target antibiotic treatment as needed.

The test, developed at Addenbrooke's hospital in collaboration with Public Health England, gives doctors the information they need to start treatment within hours rather than days, fine-tuning treatment as required and reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics.

Patients who need mechanical ventilation are at significant risk of developing secondary pneumonia while they are in intensive care.

"Early on in the pandemic we noticed that COVID-19 patients appeared to be particularly at risk of developing secondary pneumonia, and started using a rapid diagnostic test that we had developed for just such a situation," said co-author Dr Andrew Conway Morris from Cambridge's Department of Medicine and an intensive care consultant.

"Using this test, we found that patients with COVID-19 were twice as likely to develop secondary pneumonia as other patients in the same intensive care unit.".

The test - which was developed with Dr Martin Curran, a specialist in PCR diagnostics from Public Health England's Cambridge laboratory - runs multiple PCR reactions in parallel, and can simultaneously pick up 52 different pathogens, which often infect the lungs of patients in intensive care.

"We found that although patients with COVID-19 were more likely to develop secondary pneumonia, the bacteria that caused these infections were similar to those in ICU patients without COVID-19," said lead author Mailis Maes, also from the Department of Medicine!