Director at GSK & Former Postdoctoral Fellow University of California, San Francisco
Development of a Host Biomarker Assay for the Diagnosis of Acute Lyme disease and Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome
Working in a laboratory developing new diagnostic approaches for Lyme disease, Dr. Bouquet has been focusing on the identification of host biomarkers for Lyme disease using a global transcriptome profiling approach that has the potential to aid in diagnosis of both acute and post-treatment Lyme disease (PTLD) as well as disease management.
Transcriptome profiling (the study of genes that are up- and down-regulated in the body) is a technique that has been used in many different disease states, but for Lyme, until recently, had been restricted to cell culture, ticks, and animal models. This project, which began several years ago, applies next-generation sequencing (NGS) to a well-characterized set of blood samples from acute Lyme, recently-treated Lyme, and PTLD patients from the ongoing clinical study SLICE, Study of Lyme disease Immunology and Clinical Events. (This prospective study, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and run by Drs. John Aucott and Mark Soloski, was also funded in part by Bay Area Lyme Foundation.) Dr. Bouquet will compare the Lyme transcriptome profiles generated by NGS with various non-Lyme conditions. The intended outcome is the identification of a set of Lyme-specific biomarkers that can be ported to a commercial platform and ultimately used as a clinical diagnostic.
Dr. Bouquet received his BS from Université de Paris, his MEng & MS from the National Institute of Applied Sciences, France, and his PhD in Virology from Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France. He joined Dr. Chiu’s laboratory at UCSF in 2012, focusing on Infectious Diseases and particularly on Lyme disease and Lyme-like STARI (Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness).
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