Pathogens move fast. You wake up one morning feeling ready to take on the world. On your way to work, you notice your throat’s a bit scratchy, your forehead a bit warm. By lunch you’ve got a pounding headache and it hurts to breathe. Co-workers agree, you’ve got whatever’s been going around. You end the day early, using the last of your strength to drag yourself to bed. Identifying the organism causing your misery can confound even trained physicians.
When tests fail to reveal what ails you, doctors are often left to make an educated guess, finding a cure through trial and error—a test for this, a test for that. It's a process that could take days, which is valuable lost time if the infection is severe. But Charles Chiu is developing a technique to reveal all the pathogens giving you grief—bacteria, fungi, viruses—in a single test.
Chiu believes they will be able to deliver results in 48 hours with current technology. He calls it Precision Diagnosis of Acute Infectious Diseases (PDAID), and if it proves effective in studies already underway, it’ll help doctors find the roots of illness faster and cut the time patients spend in hospitals.
