Coauthors Geoffrey Ginsburg and Christopher Woods noted that this work sets the stage for future prospective evaluations of their host-based diagnostic approach in the clinical setting. “When developing diagnostics for pathogens using an RT-PCR platform . . . there are issues still with sample errors due to the frequency of the pathogen’s genomic DNA in any particular sample. Those samples that have lower numbers of pathogen copies to be detect become very well-suited for a host response-based diagnostic,” said Woods, an associate professor of medicine and global health at Duke and chief of infectious diseases at the Durham VA Medical Center in North Carolina. “One can envision, ultimately, using a combined approach that is complementary going after both the pathogens and the host response concurrently.”