The Molecular Diagnostics Revolution and Its Impact on Personalised Care

There are some clear areas where conventional testing is cumbersome and places heavy demand on a skilled workforce, which is not able to expand quickly enough to keep pace with a growing workload. One such example is bacterial vaginosis. The traditional gold standard has been a Gram stain, which is then assessed against the Nugent scoring system. This is a laborious process that relies on an experienced technician to form a subjective diagnosis.¹ In recent years, we have seen customers adopt molecular testing to introduce objectivity and crucially, to deliver the same or increased volume with a lower demand on staff time.²

One of the most promising opportunities with molecular testing is to consider how it can be applied to personalised medicine – that is how it can go beyond diagnosis and move towards prognosis, providing crucial information to inform the correct clinical pathway for each individual patient. It is also a key ingredient in the development of more targeted therapies, particularly in oncology.