Local authorities attempting to treat high rates of leprosy in Papua and West Papua found that many patients experienced fatal adverse drug reactions to dapsone, one of the main medications used by the WHO to treat the disease. Dapsone hypersensitivity syndrome (DHS) may be expressed in patients who has certain biomarkers in their genetic makeup.
Whenever authorities encountered any patients with DHS, they often stopped treating entire villages because they could not effectively identify which patients were at risk. The region needed an affordable, robust, and easily-deployable way to test each patient’s unique risk of contracting DHS.
J. J. Liu and Astrid Irwanto, Nalagenetics co-founders, established a collaboration with the Institute of Research and Development for Biomedicine Papua (IRDBP) under the Ministry of Health of Indonesia to do a validation study in Indonesian population, because the previous studies of HLA-B13:01 were done in Chinese population. The validation study showed that 20% of Eastern Indonesian population carries the HLA-B13:01 biomarker, thus confirming HLA-B13:01 as the biomarker for DHS in Indonesians, with 94% of DHS patients being positive for HLA-B13:01.
Following the validation study, Nalagenetics developed a S$5 kit to identify the HLA-B*13:01 risk allele. The partnership with IRDBP continued and we conducted prospective trials in 3 provinces in the East Indonesia region. The test was successfully done for 1,000 patients in 2017 and further 2,000 tests will be deployed in 2019-2020.
Download our factsheet to learn more about pharmacogenetics in infectious diseases.
