Mobile Health, Big Data, Antimicrobial Resistance Central to 2014 Meeting

The 2014 American Association of Clinical Chemistry (AACC; Washington DC, USA) annual meeting & clinical lab expo, which is taking place in Chicago (IL, USA) from July 27-31, 2014, focuses on mobile health, big data, and antimicrobial resistance, among many other major healthcare topics.

The meeting and clinical expo is expected to draw more than 17,500 attendees, including prominent leaders in medicine and healthcare, to Chicago’s McCormick Place. Six hundred fifty exhibitors will also introduce more than 200 new diagnostic products, making this one of the 10 largest medical exhibitions in the US.

Mobile health: digital health guru Eric Topol, MD, will deliver the keynote lecture on how mobile technology and the internet are transforming healthcare. A symposium will cover how lab-on-a-chip technology can combat illegal designer drugs, and will look at two experimental technologies that could be the future of illicit drug testing: a point-of-care volumetric bar-chart chip and a miniaturized mass spectrometry device.

Big data: Monday’s plenary speaker Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, coauthor of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, will explore how the medical world can harness the massive amounts of data generated by genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic analyses to create new diagnostic tests and disease treatments.

Infectious diseases: The World Health Organization (WHO; Geneva, Switzerland) found that microbial drug resistance has become a serious public health threat worldwide. This is a troubling trend that the short course “Hot Topics in Clinical Microbiology” will examine. Two other sessions will also focus on MALDI-TOF MS, a rising diagnostic technology that is poised to replace standard infectious disease testing techniques—some of which date back to the 1800s—and that could become an important weapon in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

Diagnostic innovations: from smart phone-based diagnostic readers, to biochips with the potential to diagnose human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), to the first human papilloma virus (HPV) test approved for primary cervical cancer screening. The latest diagnostic technology in mobile health, infectious diseases, reproductive health, and more will also be displayed at the AACC Clinical Lab Expo.

At the 2014 AACC Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo plenary sessions feature expert presentations on how mobile technology and the internet are revolutionizing healthcare, the importance of newborn screening, big data, the biologic basis of obesity, and the latest advances that could lead to a cure for HIV. Six hundred and fifty exhibitors will be demonstrating displays of the latest diagnostic their technologies, including but not limited to automation, information systems, point-of-care (POC), and biotech.

Related Links:
World Health Organization
American Association of Clinical Chemistry