Transcriptional Blood Signatures for Active and Amphotericin B Treated Visceral Leishmaniasis in India [exp2]. Transcriptional Blood Signatures for Active and Amphotericin B Treated Visceral Leishmaniasis in India [exp2]

In this study we set out to determine whole blood transcriptional profiles that might distinguish asymptomatic infection with Leishmania donovani from active disease, as well as to monitor the changes in transcriptional profiles that accompanied drug treatment. Amphotericin B provides improved therapy for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) caused by Leishmania donovani, with single dose liposomal-encapsulated Ambisome providing the best cure rates. The VL elimination program aims to reduce the incidence rate in the Indian subcontinent to 1:25,600); (ii) asymptomatic individuals who were positive by Leishmania-specific modified quantiferon assays (N=8 experiment 1; N=9 experiment 2); and (iii) Serology (DAT titer ≤1:1600) and quantiferon negative healthy endemic controls (N=6 experiment 1; N=10 experiment 2). Samples from different control or clinical groups were distributed evenly across 3 (experiment 1) or 4 (experiment 2) Illumina HT12v4 expression beadchips. Background correction, quantile normalisation and log2 transformation of the data was carried out using the Bioconductor package Limma [21]. Removal of non-expressed (detection P-value > 0.05 in all arrays) and poor quality probes previously shown to have unreliable annotation provided 21,959 and 23,466 probe sets which passed QC in experiments 1 and 2, respectively.