Emerging Technologies in Medical Microbiology for Early Diagnosis of Diseases for Better Disease Management

The success of therapies in treating, curing, and reversing the progression of a disease depends on how sooner it is diagnosed. Significant delays in diagnosis have consistently been demonstrated to be associated with more adverse clinical outcomes. Therefore, early diagnosis of disease (microbial as well as nonmicrobial) is essential to reduce morbidity and mortality rates, and therefore, early action can ensure the best outcomes for patients. Early diagnosis and treatment of disease is vital for improving clinical outcomes, potential containment, and effective disease management. Generally, a disease progresses through three stages: normal stage, pre-disease stage, and disease stage. The transition from pre-disease stage to the disease state is critical, and detection of the pre-disease state is very crucial to achieve the early diagnosis of diseases. These critical transitions are a feature of many complex diseases including infections microbial diseases, cancers, and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs). Early warning signals (EWSs) that are measurable manifestations that could be used to anticipate a critical transition before it is reached, and this potential to anticipate is invaluable not only for early diagnosis of the disease but also for good prognosis thereby offering the feasibility to change the future course of a disease. If many life-threatening diseases could be diagnosed at pre-disease stage when signs and symptoms are at clinically undetectable levels, it would be revolutionary in medical therapy limiting the associated fatalities on the global human population. Novel technologies in clinical laboratory diagnosis have emerged that provide a rapid, robust, specific, and cost-effective approach. For early precise diagnosis of diseases, molecular biomarkers like microRNAs are used. Microbead-based arrays can provide individual assessment of the response to treatment, better surveillance, and management of the disease as multiple disease-related biomarkers are used for simultaneous screening of many different targets. Microfluidic systems come handy for developing portable platforms for point of care applications. Polymeric nanocarriers (PNCs) can be used as noninvasive nanoimaging probes to improve the imaging efficiency for early diagnosis. The dynamical information on molecular fluctuations as well as the correlations between molecules) is explored with dynamical network biomarkers (DNB); hence, DNB are useful to identify emergence of the critical transition of a biological system before the appearance of clinical symptoms, thereby achieving early diagnosis at the pre-disease stage. The new emerging technologies, however, need FDA approval and should be commercialized at reasonably low cost with sufficient sensitivity to be used as routine analysis tools in clinical practice.