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Precision Infectious Disease Solutions
Our precision infectious disease solutions are designed to address the urgent need for detecting and identifying pathogen genomes, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites, especially in immunocompromised patients. Patients with weakened immune systems constitute 10-15% of hospitalized patients and are at a significantly higher risk of infection from uncommon pathogens. However, traditional methods like pathogen culture and PCR often fail to provide definitive results for a significant proportion of immunocompromised patients with infections. Delays in diagnosis not only increase mortality rates but also escalate healthcare costs. Timely and accurate infection diagnosis is critical for healthcare providers to make informed treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.
Co-developed by the A*STAR Genome Institute of and General Hospital, we aim to provide end-to-end solutions that equip diagnostic laboratories with ready-to-deploy clinical workflows to enhance their capability for managing infectious diseases. Leveraging cutting-edge microbial genomic and metagenomic technologies developed at A*STAR, our solutions combine clinical laboratory workflows with AI-assisted analytic software to provide precise pathogen characterization, thereby improving treatment decisions and reducing the number of invasive diagnostic tests. These innovations are currently undergoing clinical validation in an accredited diagnostic laboratory, with collaborative expertise from Genome Institute of Singapore, General Hospital, and Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub), ensuring that they meet the highest standards of accuracy and effectiveness in healthcare environments.
With our unique solutions, we enable near-bedside, high-accuracy, broad-range pathogen detection using metagenomic next-generation sequencing. By analyzing thousands of pathogen species within a single test, we offer a comprehensive and efficient approach to infectious disease diagnosis. By bringing advanced diagnostic capabilities closer to the patient, we reduce the time to diagnosis, enabling faster treatment decisions and improving patient outcomes.
● Shorten the diagnostic turnaround time and reduce hospitalization time.
● Enable geographical-based performance fine-tuning to capture unique epidemiology at different locations.
● Aggregate pathogen genomic information to enable effective genomic-driven outbreak investigations.
Selected Publications
- Suphavilai, Chayaporn, et al. "." The Lancet Microbe 5.9 (2024).
- Ko, Karrie KK, et al. "Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 spike mutations during prolonged infection in immunocompromised hosts." Microbiology Spectrum 10.3 (2022): e00791-22.
- Ko, Karrie KK, Kern Rei Chng, and Niranjan Nagarajan. "." Nature Microbiology 7.4 (2022): 486-496.
- Chng, Kern Rei, et al. "Cartography of opportunistic pathogens and antibiotic resistance genes in a tertiary hospital environment." Nature medicine 26.6 (2020): 941-951.
- Bertrand, Denis, et al. "." Nature Biotechnology 37.8 (2019): 937-944.
- Tan, Cedric CS, et al. "." Nature Microbiology 8.5 (2023): 973-985.
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