A new study shows that genetic testing could be used to determine which drugs will — and won’t — work for patients with Candida auris (C. auris), a multidrug-resistant yeast that causes life-threatening disease. These findings could improve treatment for C. auris infections by enabling patients to start taking effective antifungal agents sooner. The study was published today in a special issue of the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine’s (formerly AACC’s) Clinical Chemistry journal titled „Genomics: Current & emerging trends in the clinical laboratory.“
Since C. auris was identified in 2009, this pathogenic fungus has spread worldwide, causing severe illness in patients in healthcare facilities. Not only is it deadly, with an estimated mortality rate ranging from 30%-60%, but it is also particularly challenging to treat. One of the major reasons for this is that there are many different strains of C. auris, each of which has a different genetic profile that confers resistance to different antifungal drugs. Clinical labs currently use susceptibility testing to determine which drugs a specific strain of C. auris is resistant to. This involves growing a sample of a patient’s C. auris in the presence of different antifungal agents and waiting to see which drug kills the fungus. However, it can be difficult to interpret C. auris susceptibility test results because minimum inhibitory concentration breakpoints — i.e., the lowest concentrations of different antifungal drugs that will stop its growth — have not been fully established.
