New approach to investigate Common Variable Immunodeficiency patients using spectrochemical analysis of blood

Abstract

Common variable immune deficiency (CVID) is a primary immunodeficiency disease, characterized by hypogammaglobulinemia, recurrent infections and various complications. The clinical heterogeneity of CVID has hindered identification of an underlying immune defect; diagnosis relies on clinical judgement, alongside evidence-based criteria. The lack of pathognomonic clinical or laboratory features leads to average diagnostic delays of 5 years or more from the onset. Vibrational spectroscopic techniques such as Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy have recently gained increasing clinical importance, being rapid-, non-invasive and inexpensive methods to obtain information on the content of biological samples. This has led us to apply FTIR spectroscopy to the investigation of blood samples from a cohort of CVID patients; revealing spectral features capable of stratifying CVID patients from healthy controls with sensitivities and specificities of 97% and 93%, respectively for serum, and 94% and 95%, respectively for plasma. Furthermore we identified several discriminating spectral biomarkers; wavenumbers in regions indicative of nucleic acids (984 cm−1, 1053 cm−1, 1084 cm−1, 1115 cm−1, 1528 cm−1, 1639 cm−1), and a collagen-associated biomarker (1528 cm−1), which may represent future candidate biomarkers and provide new knowledge on the aetiology of CVID. This proof-of-concept study provides a basis for developing a novel diagnostic tool for CVID.