Summary
In the words of the Treatment Action Group’s Tuberculosis (TB) Diagnostics Pipeline Report 2025, “The global landscape for TB diagnostics is on the verge of a transformative shift. With a new class of tools soon to be recommended, diagnostic algorithms will evolve significantly. The challenge will be to use these new tools to close the persistent diagnostic gap while managing costs within increasingly constrained TB program budgets”. Indeed, the overarching theme of the 2025 Union World Conference on Lung Health in Copenhagen could have been diagnostic innovation. From a wide range of sessions covering new diagnostic and screening modalities, to the exhibition hall where vendors of diagnostic and screening products were dominant, the conference was abuzz with talk about the changing landscape around new and emerging products and approaches that could soon become available. Conversations spanned from the development of cutting-edge tools that use technologies such as CRISPR and artificial intelligence at near point-of-care or point-of-care settings, to potential transitions away from sputum samples and towards the use of oral swabs in existing diagnostics, to solving implementation and regulatory challenges for novel diagnostics in sessions such as the Critical Pathway workshop that reviewed the experiences of nine countries. Other focuses included the development of novel diagnostic and screening tools to diagnose incipient TB or latent TB that will soon become active, and reviews of progress in relation to the WHO target product profiles for novel TB screening tools and diagnostics
