Molecular Diagnostics Unlocks DNA Code to Detect Diseases

Episode # 61
Uploaded: July 20, 2011
Running Time: 02:26

CROWN: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. Rapidly diagnosing disease is an enormous advantage offered by Molecular Diagnostics at the NIH Clinical Center. And it all starts with a strand of DNA. There are no swabs or petri dishes in their labs. Instead, the teams uses a method called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to selectively amplify and replicate DNA, looking for a virus, bacteria, fungus or other disease-causing organism.

Gary Fahle, director of Clinical Center's Molecular Diagnostics says:

FAHLE: So if you are looking to see if someone has some sort of a viral infection, you determine that there is a particular region in their DNA that is unique to just that pathogen. Then you focus on just that piece of DNA and you amplify it or you replicate it billions of times in a small tube in your reaction. Once you have created so many copies of that DNA it is then relatively easy to detect that it's there.

CROWN: The process can take just a few hours and result in a diagnosis – the answer a researcher or patient has been waiting for.

FAHLE: Some people I think get very confused and think it is very complicated -- PCR and amplifying DNA. It seems like something that is a very complex concept but it's really not. It's really an elegantly simple thing to do. It's just taking the basic properties of DNA replication and then doing that in a test tube.

CROWN: PCR isn't a new scientific technique, though traditionally it's most often used in a research setting. At the Clinical Center, it's used from the bench to the bedside – from research into the clinical application. The Molecular Diagnostics team stays busy running a high volume of tests and developing new tests, known as assays. All the while, medical technologists like Jennifer Boyer say they know they're making a difference in both the advancement of the Center's research and its patient population.

BOYER: You always kind of think: that is someone's mom or that is someone's child. And it hits home a little bit because you want to get an answer and you want to help them as fast as possible.

CROWN: From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Ellen Crown, at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

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