Diagnostics for a personalized medical future: extending our senses to the molecular scale

Unprecedented advances in our understanding of the molecular world around us and within us have the potential to drive a revolution in health care. A key aspect of bringing this revolution to fruition is streamlining and simplifying our ability to detect and quantify molecules of biomedical relevance. New "sample in--answer out" diagnostic systems, some with the potential to detect even single viruses or single copies of molecules, are under development in many academic and industrial laboratories worldwide. This chapter discusses our efforts at the University of Rochester towards the development of three complementary molecular detection systems, with applications from allergy diagnosis to monitoring infectious disease.