'Flu Crew' Visiting Freshman Residence Halls
September 8 , 2009
DURHAM, N.C. -- Hundreds of Duke undergraduates are about to experience medical research first-hand as volunteers for a scientific team that seeks to develop better ways of identifying H1N1 and other respiratory illnesses.
Duke researchers will be holding informational sessions this week in five residence halls for first-year students. They hope to recruit 500 to 800 participants to test a genomic early-detection technology for flu and other respiratory infections and to map the spread of viruses on campus.
Researchers involved in the project include the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke.
Students who enroll in the clinical trial will report any symptoms the moment they appear as well as any contact they’ve had with friends or family members. The team will analyze this information with new genomic techniques. Ultimately, they hope to identify who is sick even before symptoms appear.
“It is highly likely that many of our students will be exposed to some sort of upper respiratory infection in the coming months,” said Christopher Woods, M.D., an infectious disease expert at Duke and the lead physician who will oversee the health of the students who enroll in the study. “What we are asking them to do is to be aware of how they are feeling and to check in with us every day via a Web interface to record and alert us at the earliest moment they feel they may be getting sick.”
Investigators will take a medical history and about a teaspoon of blood from each volunteer upon entry into the study. The participants will then be asked to fill out a daily Web survey of their health and to report any symptoms of upper respiratory infections. If they appear symptomatic, volunteers will be asked to identify close friends and associates with whom they have had close contact. Those people, in turn, will be asked to volunteer for assessment.
Investigators will monitor these Web reports and will collect additional blood along with saliva and nasal fluids from students whose illness is confirmed.
The team is coordinating its work closely with the Student Health Center and others at Duke who are providing care for any students who become ill with H1N1 and other respiratory illnesses. A special website about Duke’s extensive measures to deal with the flu is online at duke.edu/flu.
The study is part of a much larger effort led by the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. The goal is to design a portable, easy-to-use diagnostic device that can predict who will become sick with an upper respiratory virus.
In earlier research, Geoffrey Ginsburg, M.D., the lead investigator of the study, identified a “signature” in gene activity that signaled an upper respiratory infection.
“This ‘acute respiratory infection signature’ reflects genes that are turned on shortly after infection with a respiratory virus, and it gives us quite a bit of information about how the infected person is responding to infection,” said Ginsburg, who directs the Center for Genomic Medicine in Duke’s IGSP.
Researchers will be looking for changes in the RNA in the volunteers’ blood that may indicate the presence of a virus. Sophisticated mapping will track the timing and the spread of the virus.