Containing outbreaks: how Utah's molecular diagnostic companies are helping doctors worldwide.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: Technology

Modern travel has created opportunities in the global economy that people couldn't have even imagined a century ago. Need to meet with someone halfway around the world? Board a plane and be on their doorstep in a matter of hours.

But the same technology that allows travel to any where in less time than it once took for a person to travel to a neighboring town by foot also makes it easy for pathogens once restricted to their own geographic regions to move as freely as their human hosts. From headline-grabbing horrors like Zika and Ebola to quieter but more prevalent ailments like malaria or even influenza, it's hard not to wonder if the world will end not with fire or flood, but with a sneeze.

DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA

Before doctors can fight disease, they have to know what it is they're dealing with. Enter molecular diagnostics, a field that focuses on looking at illnesses on a molecular level for quicker and more accurate identification--and one strongly represented in Utah.

Among the state's molecular diagnostic companies is BioFire Diagnostics, which has one of the few emergency use-authorized tests for Ebola approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The test has been used "quite extensively" in the United States, Western Africa and other affected areas, says Wade Stevenson, senior vice president of sales and marketing for BioFire Diagnostics, and the company is also in conversations with the FDA for an emergency authorization of a test for the Zika virus.

The Zika test would include other ailments with similar symptoms to help doctors target their diagnosis, he says. While Zika is--despite headlines' suggestions to the contrary--still fairly rare, it's important for doctors to be at least able to rule it out, Stevenson says.

"A lot of infectious diseases present with very similar if not identical symptoms. How often do you hear 'flulike symptoms'?" he says. "It allows physicians to more frequently identify what's making their patients sick. You come back from the Amazon and you've got a fever--Zika is just one of a bunch of organisms you really should be worried about. It's incredibly expensive and time consuming to test for them one by one, and oftentimes physicians forget (one), so by lumping them together, you drastically increase the probability that you will find a correct diagnosis."

EBB AND FLOW

Working with exotic, high-profile diseases can help solve a problem that could cause worldwide panic, hut also comes with potential...