Yale researchers identify biomarker key to finding new viral infections

A recent study from the Foxman lab at the Yale School of Medicine has indicated that screening patients for a certain cytokine biomarker could be a key way to identify new and dangerous viral pathogens emerging in human populations, improving current public health surveillance systems. According to Ellen Foxman, an associate professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, there are three current methods most used for detecting new viral pathogens: surveying for outbreaks of infections not explained by a known virus and sequencing samples of interest, monitoring for viruses in animals that have the biological potential to jump into human populations and sequencing random clinical samples to find genetic sequences that could correspond to viral infections. The findings of this study would mainly improve upon the third method of surveillance. Testing for this cytokine biomarker, called CXCL10, could help to drastically reduce the number of samples needing...