HALTalk with Dr. Dorottya Nagy-Szakal

A CONVERSATION ABOUT SCIENCE 

Challenges in infectious disease diagnostics and antibiotic stewardship?

What is next-generation sequencing (NGS) and how can it be used in the fight against the pandemic?

How AI can be used to fight against infectious diseases and the current pandemic?

How can science leverage insights gathered from the microbiome and virome to fight against infectious diseases through the development of precision diagnostics –with a special focus on women’s health?

How to harness microbial genetic information to develop breakthrough diagnostic and surveillance tools?

Our first HALTalk of the year could not be more relevant—and could not be more exciting!

Dr. Nagy-Szakal earned her MD and PhD in clinical medicine from Semmelweis University of Medicine in Hungary. Holding a research assistant professor at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and previous postdoctoral fellowships at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children's Hospital and Columbia University, she has 12+ years of experience in translational medicine, pediatrics, gastroenterology and microbiology.

As a medical doctor with extensive international clinical and basic science experience focused on clinical metagenomics, she gained experience in human and mammalian microbiome studies using novel next-generation sequencing-based technologies. She led cutting-edge clinical trials on fecal microbiota transplantation and developed a multi-center research program to understand the role of the gut-brain axis in the integrative neuroscience field with the ultimate goal of improving diagnostics and developing novel therapies.

At her current position as the Chief Medical Officer of Biotia, Dr. Nagy-Szakal is responsible for implementing novel technologies at the laboratory, achieving the highest quality of research by state standards, providing clinical implementation of microbiome and virome data, and engaging healthcare leaders using Biotia’s novel AI-driven technology in infectious disease diagnostics. She has built a high complexity NGS lab in New York State associated with SUNY Downstate. She has been applying sequencing-based technology in medical environments and clinical specimens to profile and understand microbial dynamics and drug resistance. 

Her team raised $3.9M to date and drove strategic planning at the company and expanded to work with >8 hospitals and contractors such as NASA, XPRIZE and Twist Bioscience. Built and launched user portal and BIOTIA-ID, a software, data and lab toolkit for fighting ID. Granted FDA EUA for NGS test and COVID-DX software (first target enrichment NGS test for COVID-19 and first cloud-based software technology for NGS COVID-19 testing). She has been leading the COVID-19 pandemic response. Drove strategy and communication with the FDA, CDC, NYS DOH, and NYC Health and Hospitals. She has 30+ publications in highly respected peer-reviewed scientific journals and two book chapters. Dr. Nagy-Szakal is also the President of the New York Hungarian Scientific Society.

Precision Infectious Disease Diagnostics 

As the spread of infectious diseases, current pandemic, and growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues globally, next-generation sequencing (NGS) became a tool to diagnose infectious diseases. The rapid identification of pathogens providing key information on species, strains, genetic variants and geographic origin, NGS and artificial intelligence-based approach enables emerging pathogen and strain identification, patient risk stratification, AMR tracking, clinical interpretation and outcome prediction