Clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS), the comprehensive analysis of microbial and host DNA and RNA in samples from patients, is rapidly moving from research to clinical laboratories. This emerging approach is changing the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, with applications in a range of areas, including oncology, human host gene expression (transcriptomics), and antimicrobial infections and resistance.

In this webinar, Elif Dagdan, the director of the Center for Medical Genetics at Augusta Hospital Bochum in Bochum, Germany, will discuss real-world applications of using clinical mNGS to improve diagnostics of cancer and infectious diseases. The talk will also feature challenges and opportunities of using mNGS in disease diagnostics and how Dagdan’s lab uses clinical variant interpretation and reporting software from Qiagen to detect and characterize pathogenic somatic variants.

Dagdan will discuss:

How mNGS can be used to assess homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) status in patients with ovarian cancer.
How mNGS can be used to assess cell-free microbial DNA via liquid biopsy to aid in early-stage lung cancer diagnosis.
How mNGS can improve the accuracy and speed of infectious disease diagnostics, with a use-case on cardiovascular infections in intensive care units.