Lhe government wants to settle accounts with medical biology laboratories. This would be a serious mistake for the future of medical diagnostics in France.
In the spring of 2020, the French were able to count on their laboratories as never before for their Covid PCR tests, the « drive »Sidep transmissions [Système d’information de dépistage populationnel, qui vise au suivi exhaustif de l’ensemble des tests effectués en France dans les laboratoires de ville et hospitaliers pour la recherche du SARS-CoV-2]… Thanks to the honorable choice of free services made by the government, the laboratories have provided more than 300 million tests.
To achieve this feat, it was necessary to create these PCR tests for an unknown virus overnight, before making them available to all French people. Because they had the skills to enable such innovations, virological medical biologists at public university hospitals developed the first generation of Covid PCR tests. They also screened the first surge of contamination of hospitalized patients, then distributed their PCR tests to private laboratories for the following waves.
At the request of the government, the latter, more numerous and widely established, have equipped themselves and recruited staff in record time to provide PCR tests in the hundreds of millions. This chain of collaboration between public biology and private biology has been a considerable asset in the fight against this virus.
Establish a medical diagnosis
Similarly, in 2022, the medical biology laboratories of university hospitals created PCR tests for monkeypox. If funding is secured, biologists will resume this research and its applications for the next emerging viruses and bacteria.
But medical biology also involves hundreds of analyzes that contribute to establishing a medical diagnosis – with imaging, it contributes to 70% of a medical diagnosis) or chronic pathology monitoring near patients’ homes, in nursing homes and in hospitals. These analyzes are becoming more and more efficient, like the genetic analyzes of patient tumors offering them the benefit of targeted and personalized anti-cancer therapy.
The French can be proud of their medical biology: medical biologists and clinicians in public hospitals enable increasingly efficient diagnoses to be made and file patents in competition with the largest research teams worldwide; industrialists and private biologists allow their very rapid deployment on a large scale.
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