Development of a bioinformatic pipeline for identification of emerging infectious diseases among patients in regimen of chronic transfusion

Abstract

Studies in the field of viral metagenomics have increased its importance in the recent decades due to advances of the Next Generation Sequencing (SNG), mainly due to the possibility of identifying emerging viruses without any knowledge of their genomic characteristics. In this scenario, patients who receive multiple blood transfusions or continuous treatments with hemoderivatives (beta-thalassemia, sickle-cell disease and hemophilia) are especially vulnerable, because they show a higher risk of acquisition of parenterally transmitted infectious diseases. Moreover, these patients manifest specific immunological alterations which might be responsible for the development of chronic viral infections and subsequent viral carriage. Therefore, such patients are target of interest for the identification of emerging, re-emergent and non-suspected viral agents that may adversely affect the patient survival. At the same time viral metagenomics performed in this group can reveal non-suspected viruses which demonstrate transfusion-transmitted potential. One of the main challenges of viral metagenomics are the bioinformatic procedures. Some difficulties include the processing of large amounts of data, lack of qualified bioinformaticians in Brazil, the complexity of the bioinformatic tools and the clinical interpretation of the obtained data. Therefore, our objective is to develop a bioinformatic pipeline to analyze the virome in blood samples obtained from patients with thalassemia, sickle cell disease and hemophilia. In addition, analysis of the viral molecular evolution will be performed, including phylogenetic analysis, presence of viral subpopulations and genotyping. The development of this project counts with international collaborations of the Institute Pasteur, France and the National Institute of Blood Transfusion, France. (AU)