Diagnostics in the Reference Labs: Putting the Patient First

Technologies are rapidly maturing, which enable evaluation of disease specific and informative molecules with high sensitivity and on a large scale. The rate of new marker discovery is therefore advancing rapidly and so focus on diagnostics with high value for individual patients is at risk of being lost in scientific excitement – more is not necessarily better.

In addition, individual patients and physicians are interested in accessing diagnostics which are useful to detect, diagnose, select treatments, and monitor multiple diseases in a comprehensive manner. Finally, as diagnostics are developed, cost of testing and ability to access results in a timely manner to impact patient care are crucial.

With these challenges in mind, there are emerging examples of comprehensive and highly clinically valuable diagnostics that represent a distillation of the right information for the right patient at the right time. These examples represent technology innovation to enable proactive medicine.