Mobile health, big data, and antimicrobial resistance take center stage at the 2014 AACC

From July 27–31, the 2014 AACC Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab 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 U.S.

The 2014 AACC annual meeting will include insights on the following:

• Mobile health. Digital health guru Eric Topol, MD, will deliver the keynote on how mobile technology and the internet are transforming healthcare. Another symposium will also 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, co-author 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. A recent report from the World Health Organization found that microbial drug resistance has become a serious public health threat worldwide, 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.
• Game-changing diagnostic innovations. From smartphone-based diagnostic readers, to biochips with the potential to diagnose HIV, to the first HPV test approved for primary cervical cancer screening, the newest diagnostic technology in mobile health, infectious diseases, reproductive health, and more will be displayed at the AACC Clinical Lab Expo. Learn more about the 2014 AACC.