Every year, approximately 800,000 critically ill patients are hospitals in the USA with undiagnosed infections. The only option is to treat these patients with broad-spectrum antimicrobial therapy and hope for the best outcome. The inability to obtain specific actionable information in a clinically relevant time-frame, combined with ineffective treatment, contributes to increased disease burden, mortality, hospitalizations, and drug resistance. The consequence is direct hospitalization costs of more than $27 billion, with another $26 billion lost due to antimicrobial resistance. What is urgently needed is precise and comprehensive targeted pathogen identification, including the capacity to detect drug-resistant mutations, for routine diagnosis to support effective treatment and control measures.
Fusion Genomics Corp.’s mission is to address this need and enable precision medicine for infectious diseases by developing a pan-pathogen test - the ONETest™ PathoGenome - that identifies all human pathogens (~1,400) and provides the genomic information necessary to guide treatment, including drug resistance and human genetic susceptibility markers in a timely fashion. The assay uses next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) along with Fusion’s novel DNA hybridization technology, QuantumProbes, to enrich bacterial/viral/fungal genomes prior to sequencing. The assay will be functionally equivalent, yet clinically superior, to whole metagenome sequencing, but at 1/10th the cost, 1/3rd the time, and several times the sensitivity.

Learning Objectives: 

1. learn how NGS will impact undiagnosed infections  
2. learn about the advantages of using targeted sequencing versus whole metagenome sequencing