Democratized Precision Diagnostics

Modern medicine aims to improve our current abilities to diagnose and treat human diseases via a more personal health assessment. The success stories have created a moment to convert healthcare processes, however, access to precision medicine is still limited to only a few healthcare systems, some diseases, and dependent on infrastructures and technologies. The first access point into precision medicine is precision diagnostics, which aims to detect the disease as early as possible to classify a patient’s health status precisely and to find the most effective treatment options. The idea behind “Democratized Precision Diagnostics” started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we invited random participants to collect drops of blood at their homes for biomarkers analyses. The dried blood was then returned to our lab to analyze hundreds of blood proteins and thereby understand the molecular consequences of an infection. This experience
motivated me to apply to the STIAS fellowship program and work on how to unlock patient-centric sampling in precision diagnostics for the most urgent needs of other healthcare systems. My work will consider the diversity of humans and has the goal to use self-sampling studies in South Africa for the benefit of the patients.