VirScan Blood Test Can Reveal Viral Infections History During Lifetime

Is it possible to determine history of viral infections from a drop of blood? A recently developed tool claims it can tell if a person has had an infection from a list of more than a 1,000 viral infections at any point during his lifetime.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School developed a tool called VirScan that can give a list of all viral infections that a person has had. The tool uses a library of viral peptides that researchers have collected for comparison with samples.

"VirScan is a little like looking back in time: using this method, we can take a tiny drop of blood and determine what viruses a person has been infected with over the course of many years. What makes this so unique is the scale: right now, a physician needs to guess what virus might be at play and individually test for it. With VirScan, we can look for virtually all viruses, even rare ones, with a single test," said corresponding author Stephen Elledge. The tool was detailed in the journal Science.

As part of the study, researchers tested blood samples of 600 people from Peru, the United States, South Africa and Thailand. They found that immune systems of a large number of people recognized the same portions of a virus. Such information can help better understand immunity.

The tool's makers believe VirScan can help uncover as yet unknown correlations between a virus and future disease, like the link between Epstein-Barr virus and certain types of cancers.

"Viral infection can leave behind an indelible footprint on the immune system. Having a simple, reproducible method like VirScan may help us generate new hypotheses and understand the interplay between the virome and the host's immune system, with implications for a variety of diseases," Elledge said.