In Quebec there's a tremendous industry in diagnostics. I personally have a dream that when a patient is being prescribed an antibiotic, they're being prescribed an antibiotic only when the doctor or whoever is prescribing knows that there's an infection and knows exactly what they're prescribing, right?
One of the problems we have is that doctors don't actually know if the patient has a bacterial infection, and even if they do, they don't know what organism they're treating. Diagnostics and choosing wisely the diagnostic tests would absolutely help in this effort. That kind of innovation is absolutely necessary.
On top of that, today we don't have all the technology available at the bedside but it's foreseeable, so at least then we should have the available data. We should be able to say, based on the patient's GPS coordinates, that we know what germs are circulating and their drug resistance. If we don't have a bedside test, we should be able to say what the best antibiotic is for this infection in this patient.
Those two things are foreseeable in the next five to 10 years, but it requires investment. It's investment that wouldn't require new drug development, but it does require investment in infrastructure for the data science and the research and innovation in, for example, the diagnostics industry.
