Home testing for COVID-19 was a major success for safely getting through the pandemic as people could safely return to work or social gatherings. That has opened the door to the demand for more at-home tests. This talk will go through pros and cons of home testing for infectious diseases so people can better understand the benefits and risks.

Access to appropriate testing is crucial for identification, appropriate management, and containment of sexually transmitted infections (STI), mitigating their impact on public health. Without access to diagnostics, people will often unknowingly spread infections throughout their community or miss valuable opportunities to ensure they are maintaining reproductive health. Combined, there is a need for accessible and comprehensive services to screen for Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, and HPV.

There is an increasing interest in the use of complex and expensive sequencing-based tests for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. Reports on the utility of the test have been variable. This presentation highlights challenges to the use of NGS tests and potential approaches to maximize the effectiveness of it.

Host response profiling by RNA sequencing  in combination with the generation of machine learning based classification models can be used to differentiate among different infections (e.g., bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic) and non-infectious conditions. Here I will discuss how clinical metagenomic sequencing data has been leveraged to develop host response profiles for differential diagnosis of infections. I will also show how novel artificial intelligence methods, such as the use of generative adversarial networks, can be applied to obtain useful results from very small sample cohorts. 

Infectious diseases remain a leading cause of death worldwide because despite technological advances, current diagnostic approaches are limited in detecting causative pathogen and fail to account for the host response to infection. Detrimental host responses can lead to increased morbidity and mortality. This talk will present recent technological advances that have enabled robust interrogation of the host response to infection and translation of these findings into rapid, point-of-care tests.