Working With Your Doctor

Genomics urine testing is commonly used by infectious disease specialists and research studies. Local physicians and specialists may not be aware of their use or see their validity over the traditional agar plate urine culture. 

There are a number of papers to show that cultures can only detect 1% of all microorganisms and there are a number of papers to show that sequencing is more accurate. It doesn't take that much in terms of understanding that cultures have to grow the microbes, DNA or molecular diagnostics relying on extraction of the DNA, identify the species by its DNA.

MicroGen has also done head to head clinical trials to show that if an antibiotic decision is made on culture versus DNA, that when the antibiotic decision is based on DNA, it's more accurate because patients' symptoms came down faster, and more of them cleared up their infection than with culture.

Patients who have already had both cultures and antibiotics which did not resolve their infection can say  "Well, we've already done the same thing, we already tried cultures, why are we doing the same thing again? Why don't we try a new diagnostic technique? Because I'm still symptomatic and still suffering."

Physicians, or their brains have been calibrated to look at C&S reports, or culture and sensitivity reports. Where they're simply laid out where they show what single bacteria grew, or they were able to grow, and then what antibiotics were shown to be sensitive to that bacteria. It's a simple one bug and one drug, which obviously understanding physicians and their workload and number of patients they have to see, if you can keep it simple the better it is and faster for them to make clinical decisions.

If the physician once given the report doesn't believe them, MicroGen can show that they have proven concordance, which essentially means they've done studies that show if a culture grew Staph where we are able to actually also identify or detect the Staph. The answer is they've done those studies we have 96.1% concordance which essentially means 96% of the time we can find what the culture lab was able to grow.

However, the cultures often only detect one microbe, they often detect poly-microbial infections, multiple species in the sample and the cultures are not picking up all those other species.

You can say, "Well doc, you treated based on culture and my culture in the past has either been negative or “whatever it was” grew. You treated it and I didn't get better. Now this is saying, for example, my urine is loaded with anaerobes, a type of bacteria. I've never been treated for that. I would like you to now treat me for the dominant species based on DNA evidence versus culture. I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing this, and I would really like you to be open-minded to making a treatment decision based on this evidence versus doing another culture again."

If a urologist sees no value in additional testing,  a patient can ask another doctor to order/review the test. MicroGen has infectious disease doctors who will do a phone consult with the patient and walk them through the results. We can also have the infectious disease doctor notify their doctor and talk to their doctor about how the test has been utilized and how beneficial it has been.