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Review
. 2012 May 2;2(2):50-70.
doi: 10.3390/jpm2020050.

Infectious Disease Management through Point-of-Care Personalized Medicine Molecular Diagnostic Technologies

Luc Bissonnette  1 , Michel G Bergeron  2
Affiliations
Review

Infectious Disease Management through Point-of-Care Personalized Medicine Molecular Diagnostic Technologies

Luc Bissonnette et al. J Pers Med. .

Abstract

Infectious disease management essentially consists in identifying the microbial cause(s) of an infection, initiating if necessary antimicrobial therapy against microbes, and controlling host reactions to infection. In clinical microbiology, the turnaround time of the diagnostic cycle (>24 hours) often leads to unnecessary suffering and deaths; approaches to relieve this burden include rapid diagnostic procedures and more efficient transmission or interpretation of molecular microbiology results. Although rapid nucleic acid-based diagnostic testing has demonstrated that it can impact on the transmission of hospital-acquired infections, we believe that such life-saving procedures should be performed closer to the patient, in dedicated 24/7 laboratories of healthcare institutions, or ideally at point of care. While personalized medicine generally aims at interrogating the genomic information of a patient, drug metabolism polymorphisms, for example, to guide drug choice and dosage, personalized medicine concepts are applicable in infectious diseases for the (rapid) identification of a disease-causing microbe and determination of its antimicrobial resistance profile, to guide an appropriate antimicrobial treatment for the proper management of the patient. The implementation of point-of-care testing for infectious diseases will require acceptance by medical authorities, new technological and communication platforms, as well as reimbursement practices such that time- and life-saving procedures become available to the largest number of patients.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Personalized medicine in infectious disease management. The implementation of rapid point-of-care (POC) microbiology shall decrease the length of the diagnostic cycle in order to accelerate infectious disease management.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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