ANA Investigates Pioneering Unbiased Diagnostics Part 2: Autoantibody Syndrome

This month, we'll have part two of our two-part series on unbiased diagnostics in neurologic disease. As you may remember from our first episode, UCSF neurohospitalist Megan Richie interviewed Dr. Michael Wilson, a neuro-immunologist at UCSF, about a technique called metagenomic next generation sequencing, or mNGS. mNGS is a way of searching all of the genetic material in a CSF sample for the presence of any non-human organisms. This approach is thought of as “unbiased” – it allows us to search for any infectious organism present in the central nervous system, rather than coming up with a list of possible infections and testing for each of them individually. Today, we’re back with Megan Richie for part 2 of this series, interviewing Dr. Samuel Pleasure about autoantibody testing and hearing more from Dr. Wilson comparing the methods and future plans. Series 1, Episode 3.