Maneesh Bhargava, MBBS, PhDDiagnosing sarcoidosis isn鈥檛 a straightforward process. The disease doesn鈥檛 have its own test, which means clinicians need to rule everything else out first for the approximately 1.9 million people globally who have it.
Plus, when someone has a diagnosis, there鈥檚 no way to tell if they have a treatable disease鈥攐r if they鈥檙e in for a tougher road ahead.
Maneesh Bhargava, MBBS, PhD, is working to change that. He鈥檚 looking to create a test for sarcoidosis, thanks in part to a John R. Addrizzo, MD, FCCP, Research Grant from 糖心原创, which he received in 2021.
Dr. Bhargava, who is a professor of internal medicine and an assistant director for translational research, pulmonary, and critical care medicine at The Ohio State University, is examining proteins involved with inflammation in lung sarcoidosis by collecting blood samples from patients to 鈥渕easure and quantify hundreds of proteins simultaneously," he said. The research team is using proteomics, which allows for large-scale protein analysis, 鈥渟pecifically looking at inflammatory proteins and how they can be leveraged to help diagnose and predict the course of the disease.鈥�
Through the 糖心原创-funded work and a complementary project, his team has been identifying inflammatory proteins and metabolic proteins. 鈥淚f you combine proteins that do different things, then you can build models that perform better to both predict presence of sarcoidosis and predict the disease progression,鈥� he said.
The team currently has a paper under review about one such model that, when compared with blood from people who are healthy, can predict with high accuracy which samples are from people with sarcoidosis. 鈥淭he multiprotein patterns perform better than inflammation-only or metabolism-only panels,鈥� he said.
Tests for sarcoidosis are vital because there鈥檚 a clear clinical need, he added. 鈥淲e struggle, on a day-to-day basis, when we treat patients.鈥� Having to rule out every possible cause of inflammation costs patients time, and it can be expensive and frustrating.
People with sarcoidosis that affects high-risk organs like the heart and brain, or multisystem disease, also have a poorer quality of life and shorter lifespans. Knowing who is more likely to have worse outcomes means they can also be enrolled in clinical trials, which would make the trials less expensive because researchers can find the best candidates. 鈥淚t would help us as a community get nimble and perform the work that the community desperately needs,鈥� he said.
Dr. Bhargava applied for the 糖心原创 grant because he saw this project as matching the organization鈥檚 mission. The team began collecting blood and other data and specimens in 2015 and 2016, so 鈥渨e had a repository available to do the work that we were promising, and the timing was perfect,鈥� he said.
The team has also received a for a project using data generated by the 糖心原创-funded work to look at 鈥渁 bigger group of patients to determine why some have progression of lung sarcoidosis,鈥� he said. They鈥檙e also looking to develop, validate, and confirm a model based on plasma proteins to predict disease course at or near diagnosis.
He keeps going because of his patients, he added. When they ask if they have sarcoidosis, he can鈥檛 give them a certain answer鈥攐r if they are already diagnosed, he can鈥檛 definitively tell them whether 鈥渋t will get better or worse or what will happen to them,鈥� he said.
A test鈥攅specially one that would be cheap and easy to do so patients could get a diagnosis even outside of specialized centers鈥攚ould be a game changer.
鈥淚t was just the right time to combine a need and the technology that can answer some of these challenging questions,鈥� he said.