As highlighted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the technologies and commercial products available for disease diagnosis and immunity determination include important limitations that drive cost, detection limits, time-to-result, sensitivity/selectivity against false results, and availability at the point of care. The shortcomings of COVID-19 diagnostics are representative of those used in the contexts of bacterial pathogens, fungal pathogens, vector-borne illness, food safety, and monitoring of environmental resources1-6. The vision for the CPD is to establish a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research and development team to address significant technological and scientific gaps in the field of pathogen detection.
The research represents five “pillars” of pathogen diagnostic technologies:
- Molecular precision mechanisms
- Sample processing
- Sensing specificity & sensitivity
- Device fabrication & instrumentation
- AI & machine learning
