AMD Initiative

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They won’t stop…

Why give killer microbes the advantage?

  • 1 in 20 hospitalized patients in the U.S. gets an infection while receiving health care
  • 5 microbes (and counting) are about to outsmart all antimicrobial drugs
  • New killer microbes are identified each year
  • Microbes jump from animals to humans and kill millions each year
  • Killer microbes can be created in the lab; intentional or not, they threaten our security

With AMD (Advanced Molecular Detection), CDC will be faster and more accurate against lethal microbes

So neither can we…

Take back the advantage with AMD

AMD combines the latest molecular sequencing and computing technologies to solve dangerous infectious disease mysteries. With AMD, CDC can find smoldering disease outbreaks we may be missing; solve disease outbreaks faster to protect communities; and stop infectious threats in our food.

With enhanced molecular-based science and bioinformatics CDC could use “big data” to

  • Rapidly and precisely diagnose infectious diseases
  • More quickly control outbreaks in our communities
  • Predict patterns of disease spread in real time to stop transmission
  • Tackle antimicrobial resistant microbes before they spread
  • Target prevention measures, like vaccines

When CDC has full AMD capacity: What now takes weeks to complete can be done in a few days or even hours.

AMD photo collage

CDC needs a more coordinated approach to fully understand and track infectious diseases. Funding from this initiative will enable CDC to build critical molecular sequencing and bioinformatics capacities at national and state levels to take back the advantage in controlling infectious diseases.

  • Converting to AMD means reducing diagnostic costs. For example, states would no longer need to submit lab cultures to CDC to identify outbreak pathogens—a slow and imprecise method.
  • With AMD, CDC could rapidly look for a microbe’s match among the thousands of reference samples in its world-class microbe library.
  • CDC will refine the use of new technologies to make them work smarter for public health and train others to use these tools to prevent and stop disease outbreaks.

The most important tools, of course, are the experts in the fields of epidemiology, laboratory science and bioinformatics. These experts need two important classes of tools: sequencing machines that can read the DNA or RNA code of a microbe and supercomputers that have the capacity to manage massive amounts of information with the software to intelligently detect patterns.

“Public health experts need the right tools at the right time to protect Americans from microbes that are growing more fierce and moving faster than ever among us.”