The research team led by Prof. Wei Hongping recently published three research papers in Journal of Clinical Microbiology on drug susceptibility tests using a new strategy named as gene-to-protein function (GPF) they proposed. “The most significant advantage of the GPF strategy is that it detects the drug susceptibility through the function of the proteins synthesized in vitro instead of the individual mutations in the susceptibility-related genes.”, said by Prof. Wei. Base on this new strategy, Li Hen, the PhD student in the team, has developed a rapid pyrazinamide (PZA) susceptibility test of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis directly from sputa, which can be finished in two days. While the time needed in the current PZA susceptibility tests ranges from a few weeks to months. Two other PhD students in the team, Huang Li and Qiao Jingjuan, have successfully used the GPF strategy to detect the functional variants of NDM-1 and the protease inhibitor's susceptibility of Hepatitis C virus, respectively. The good results obtained so far indicate that the GPF strategy could offer helps to overcome the antimicrobial resistance, which is becoming a serious health threats as revealed recently in the WHO's “Antimicrobial Resistance Global Report 2014”.

http://jcm.asm.org/content/52/1/260.short?rss=1 

http://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2014/01/16/JCM.03257-13.abstract 

http://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2014/03/20/JCM.03363-13.abstract