Risk management of infectious disease using multidimensional Omics: Molecular diagnostic and personal care of tuberculosis

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the top 10 leading causes of death worldwide responsible for over 1.5 million deaths annually. It is caused by hazardous biological pathogen (i.e., Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB)) with single infectious agent, surpassing even HIV/AIDS.  Roughly one-quarter of the world's population has latent TB, meaning that people have been infected by tuberculosis bacteria but have not yet developed the disease. Patients with active tuberculosis on average infect five to fifteen other people via airborne droplets. Once infected, people with HIV are 19 times more likely to develop active tuberculosis which has almost 100% mortality for this group, if not treated properly. Comparatively, 45% of HIV negative people will die if they develop active tuberculosis and are not adequately medicated. This is concerning since 95% of cases and deaths are in developing countries, where treatments and diagnosis may not be timely. Additionally, current detection methods do not distinguish active tuberculosis from a cleared or latent infection while microbiological culture of mycobacteria is slow. However, medical discoveries and newly developed technologies allowed for unification of disciplines incorporating omics into everyday biological research. The goal of this short review is to demonstrate ways in which field of multidimensional Omics could contributed to the advanced detection of infectious disease by improving accuracy and quality of patient care by implementing molecular based detection of pathogen (i.e., antigenicity and metabolomics tools) as well as personal care with follow-up monitoring care (i.e., immunogenicity and vaccinomics tools) in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of tuberculosis.