12 November 2021
In clinical practice, most patients with severe infections or a history of repeated hospitalizations are often referred to the emergency department or ICU. Infection-related severe pneumonia, bacteremia and sepsis are often life-threatening. Sepsis alone kills approximately 11 million people worldwide every year. Those at the highest risk of developing sepsis include the elderly, pregnant women, newborns, HIV or AIDS patients, and immunocompromised cancer patients.
To substantially reduce the risk of death, accurate and timely identification of the causative pathogens is crucial for selecting the proper treatment for the patients.
Currently, blood culture is still the
gold standard test to identify bloodstream
pathogens. However, this process can take
2-7 days, with the positivity rate less than
20%, which means in over 80% of the cases,
the pathogens remain unidentified
However, to detect the extremely low amount of microorganisms, host DNA interference is still one of the major obstacles to use sequencing technology in clinical microbiology.
Human DNA >99% is the major
bottleneck in clinical microbiology
In this article we analyzed the most recent techniques available on the market, compared their efficacy and outlined perspective of human DNA depletion for mNGS application in rapid pathogen detection and timely treatment of infectious diseases.
