Diagnostics Diagnostics


A new era in diagnosis Metagenomics:


The identifi cation of microorganisms involved in infection can be a major challenge, with fi rst- line testing often failing to identify the pathogen responsible. With no known cause of infection discovered, treatment can’t be targeted – and is often poor. But with so-called metagenomic next-generation sequencing, these challenges could soon be consigned to history. Andrea Valentino speaks to Dr Anne Jamet of the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris, and Dr Jessica Galloway-Peña from Texas A&M University to learn more.


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n 1700, Nicolas Andry made a remarkable claim: in a book published in English as An Account of the Breeding of Worms in Human Bodies, the French scientist argued that these eponymous ‘worms’ caused smallpox and other diseases. In the event, Andry was wrong: what his primitive microscope had spotted were microorganisms, not the virus that blighted faces all over Enlightenment Europe. All the same, Andry’s intuition would soon revolutionise medical science. Far from being caused by unbalanced humours, or else


some miasma in a swamp, doctors would soon hunt for the causes of infections in microorganisms – not quite worms but living organisms all the same. From these unsure beginnings, identifying the microorganisms behind diseases has become a staple task for medical researchers everywhere. According to work by The Insight Partners, to give one example, the ‘microbial identification methods’ market is expected to reach about $8bn by 2030: about double what it was in 2022. Nor is this bounding growth surprising. Allowing scientists to


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