Serological Laboratory
Laboratory focused on diagnostics by direct and indirect detection of infectious agents transmittable by sexual intercourse, viruses causing hepatitis, agents of respiratory tract infections, intrauterine and perinatal infections and other important infections e.g. herpesvirus ones. Laboratory obtained approval by the State Institute for Drug Control for diagnostics of organ and tissue donors. As concerned indirect diagnostic techniques laboratory provides detection of specific antibodies towards antigenes of many bacterial, viral, parasitic and fungal pathogens.Techniques for direct detection of infectious agents are partially used for rapid diagnostics based on bacterial, viral and fungal antigenes in biological specimens, partially for rapid detection and microbial load monitoring during therapy, using labelled hybridisation probes complementary to specific sequences of DNA of certain infectious agents in patient´samples. Amplification techniques used – PCR and real-time PCR.
One of the most important laboratory activities is diagnostics of viral hepatitis, utilising broad spectrum of diagnostic techniques for detection of specific anti-viral antibobies, different viral antigenes and specific genome sequences of hepatitis viruses. Real-time PCR is used to monitore viral load of hepatitis B and C viruses during therapy, reverse dot-blot based genotyping of HCV and HBV to determine prognosis of infection or viral resistance towards virostatics, and determination of C/T polymorphism on position 3176 of interleukin IL-28 promoter is performed in order to get prognosis of HCV clearence. Detached working unit STD (Apolinářská 4) provides complex direct diagnostics of STI including molecular biology techniques (hybridisation, PCR, real-time PCR. Laboratory covers also a part of human genome investigation - cytochrome P450 gene CYP2C19 and CYP2D6 polymorphism using Amplihip technology and tests GeneStripe PGX-HIV, PGX-Thrombo, PGX-5FU, PGX-TPMT, Sugar Intolerance, CVD-A.
Laboratory serves as training centre for postgraduate education of physicians and other laboratory staff in medical microbiology .
