Today, patients suffering from symptoms of infectious disease such as sepsis, flu-like illness, fever with rash, or meningitis, are typically all treated alike: By drawing samples for laboratory analysis, starting antibiotic therapy with the physician’s best guess as to the likely causes, and then hoping to learn the causative reason for the infection over a period of days from laboratory analysis.
Innovative diagnostics and novel serum biomarkers are required that will allow healthcare providers to distinguish, at the point of care, patients that require antibiotics and those that can be treated safely without antibiotics. In relation, this helps the rapidly growing problem of anti-microbial resistance.