Project:

Castleman Disease (CD) is a lymphoproliferative disease that involves excessive cytokine production. Four forms of CD have been described, based on the number of enlarged lymph nodes and etiology. The driver of these patients’ disease is unknown. The question that this study aims to answer is does UCD and/or iMCD driven by pathogen infection? It could be an unknown or previously known but unappreciated pathogen is driving the disease in these cases or in a subset of them.

We have used a microarray based technology, Pathochip, that contains DNA/RNA sequences of known pathogens. By measuring fluorescence of bound probes we are able to detect the presence of known viruses, fungi, and bacteria in CD samples.

We are interested in identifying signals that are above those observed in the negative controls and similar in magnitude to the signals seen for HHV8 in HHV8-MCD and EBV in post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD).