In order to ensure timely treatment of infectious diseases, adequate diagnosis is essential to mitigate negative outcomes, which can occur as a result of delayed or inappropriate treatment regimens. However, current diagnostic methods are lengthy, often requiring tissue isolation/swabbing, coupled with molecular detection and culture times, which can take hours to days, respectively, to achieve an accurate diagnosis. To ensure patients are treated without delay, clinicians frequently prescribe broad spectrum antimicrobials, as a precaution, which can result in the selection of antibiotic resistant strains. Treatment of infections is further complicated by the various syndromes that present with identical symptom constellations, which render treatment selection difficult; further lengthening the process.

This concern is exacerbated by our current Covid-19 pandemic that has reinvented the healthcare and sociological infrastructure that drives the global population. The pandemic has further highlighted the importance of emerging/re-emerging pathogenic microorganisms with pandemic potential, which threaten the safety of the worldwide populace. Innovative therapeutics targeted at eradicating infectious diseases, coupled with effective immunisation strategies, underpin what is necessary to prevent pandemic events like Covid-19. However, with new pathogen emergence, coupled with treatment evasion that occurs in existing pathogens (i.e., via antimicrobial resistance mechanisms); current vaccine or antimicrobial therapeutics are not always a viable strategy. This is obscured by microorganisms that can have variable antigenicity (i.e., different subtypes can look different to the immune system reducing immune protection); making vaccine development especially complex.

The goal of this symposium is to have access to all the latest research targeted at improving the infectious disease diagnostic, prevention, and treatment process. Attendees will be exposed to research into the development of highly sensitive and selective diagnostic tests that are significantly faster than current gold-standard methods. In addition, they will be exposed to the latest in novel prevention and treatment approaches that, if appropriately optimised and developed, could reduce the numbers of negative outcomes that are associated with antimicrobial resistance.