Candidate Proteins as Biomarkers in Chagas disease

MESIAS A; ORILLO S; ZAGO MP, BARRIO AB, CARDOZO RM, DUFFY T, SCHIJMAN AG, BASOMBRÍO MA; ZAGO MP

Galveston

Conferencia; Gordon Research Conference Tropical Infectious Diseases; 2017

Despite the advances in the diagnosis of Trypanosoma cruzi infection, current methods do not identify individuals at risk of developing clinically symptomatic chagasic cardiomyopathy. There are also not reliable methods to determine efficiency or response to trypanocidal treatment. Many research groups are looking for biomarkers (BMs) that allow the early detection of seropositive patients at risk of developing CCC and the evaluation of trypanocidal therapies. We attempted to validate the use of a set of plasma proteins postulated as BMs of Chagas disease development based on our experimental studies (Wen JJ et al, 2012). For this purpose, we recruited seropositive Chagasic patients, and included seronegative healthy volunteers and patients with non-chagasic heart disease (nCHD) at the Cardiology Service of San Bernardo Hospital located in an endemic area for Chagas disease in the north of Argentina. The proteins selected were Vinculin (VCL), myosin light chain 2 (MYL2) and Gelsolin (GSN) and their differential expression was determined by Western Blot in plasma samples. Differences in expression were studied among the experimental groups (Chagas + vs. Healthy vs. nCHD). Within seropositive Chagas+ group, patients were also classified for disease severity as 0-3 by using the Kuschnir classification system in order to evaluate the prognostic value of the three BMs. The data showed a statistically significant increase in the plasma levels of VCL (p