Successful treatment of life-threatening mycobacteriosis using adjunctive gamma-interferon therapy with genetic analysis

In our case series of 6 consecutive patients with severe disseminated mycobacterial infection and lymphocytopenia who did not responded to antimycobacterial drugs alone we used adjunctive IFN-γ treatment. IFN-gamma was effective in four out of the six cases. We identified two genes potentially correlating with NTM and TB severity (MUC5AC and FCGBP), and one (CCL4L2) suggesting a positive response to IFN-γ therapy. Further research is required to validate these findings. We propose the extended use of INF-γ as a rescue therapy in non-responder-severe cases of mycobacteriosis and encourage the use of genetic analysis to predict outcome and response to INF-γ treatment.