Tech & Health/Burke Fellowship Seminar: Precision Diagnosis of TB Resistance in Resource Limited Settings

“Precision Diagnosis of TB Resistance in Resource Limited Settings“

Although technologically complex health solutions do not always lend themselves easily to implementation in resource limited settings, I will make several arguments in this talk around how technology can circumvent challenges imposed by limited resources. I will discuss how genomics and specifically pathogen genomics is revolutionizing infectious disease response and treatment drawing on our work on characterizing molecular determinants of resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis. I will discuss our efforts in building a highly accurate whole genome based statistical learning method for resistance prediction, and using it for prediction on public data as a form of surveillance. Finally I will discuss how our approach is being implemented for individual patient care and the remaining challenges facing precision antibiotic therapy of TB.

Maha Farhat is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. She holds an MD from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and an MSc in biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Maha is also a practicing physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.