By G9ija
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to get an exciting new tool called IDseq into the hands of more people around the world in order to fight the spread of infectious diseases to a halt.
Facebook founder and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg made this known on Tuesday, saying his Biohub has been working assiduously to build the new tool for infectious disease sequencing.
He stressed that the new tool will allow scientists and health workers anywhere in the world to detect emerging diseases quickly before they become outbreaks.
“We are grateful for their partnership, and excited to work with them to continue building this tool,” said the Facebook exec.
IDseq is an example of an approach called “hypothesis-free diagnostics”. That is, today when you go to a doctor, they first come up with a best guess at what disease you may have and then they test you for that specifically — whether that’s a specific blood test, a biopsy, or so on.
With hypothesis-free diagnostics, the doctor doesn’t need to have an idea of what you might have first. They can simply draw a sample of blood, run a quick DNA sequence on it, upload the results to IDseq, and the IDseq software will determine what pathogens are present and prevalent that could cause the disease.
“In addition to being more effective at diagnostics in some cases, this approach is helping us discover connections between different diseases and pathogens we didn’t previously know about,” Zuckerberg stated.
To get this tool into the hands of more people around the world, the Gates Foundation is launching a new funding opportunity for global health scientists and doctors.