It’s a scenario that happens across the world, and it’s a major driver of antibiotic resistance. A patient wanders into a clinic with a sore throat or coughing and congested. The doctor knows the sore throat or respiratory infection is likely caused by a virus, which antibiotics can’t kill, but today’s diagnostic tools don’t allow a rapid, definitive diagnosis.
Meanwhile, the doctor often lacks effective antiviral medicine for the infection. But the patient insists that something be done to treat their illness, so the doctor prescribes an antibiotic.
Such misdirected antibiotic prescriptions are common—about 30 percent of all antibiotic prescriptions, according to a 2016 JAMA study1—and they’re an important driver of antimicrobial resistance. They’re also costly. Across the European Union, the cost of these unnecessary prescriptions totaled €2.7 billion, according to a large international study published in March 2026 in the European Journal of Health Economics.2
But earlier diagnosis of viral infection could head off much of the overprescription, says Jared Bauer of Seek Labs, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based company that builds rapid, sequence-based diagnostics for viral diseases. More important, it could save a lot of lives.
Bauer launched Seek Labs in 2016 in response to a family tragedy, after his 8-month-old son, Oliver, died from a misdiagnosed infection. “As a dad, I think your desire is to do everything for your kids that you can,” Bauer says. “And my personal experience says that that doesn’t go away when they pass.”
Making diagnosis accessible
“There are two parts of any patient story,” Bauer says: “What do you have? And what can we do? And in Oliver’s case, he didn’t have either.” Despite living in Salt Lake City, home to several leading medical institutions, doctors missed his diagnosis, which they learned later was influenza A.
An antiviral medicine like Tamiflu might have helped Oliver, Bauer says, but it and other antivirals must be given early in the infection to knock down the viral load in the patient, and doctors often decline to prescribe it, telling patients that they were diagnosed too late in the infection process.
To help remedy that situation, new types of diagnostics are needed that can spot infections in their earlier stages and be used wherever they’re needed, Bauer says. “I would have loved to have been able to go to the pharmacy and buy a higher quality test to bring home to help determine what my son had.”
At Seek Labs, Bauer adds, “We really believe in this idea of increasing the accessibility of diagnostic testing.” That means earlier diagnosis, but it also means rapid, easily accessible diagnostic tests that can be used where they’re needed, and in areas of the world with fewer medical facilities. “We want people to be able to have access to the tools to be able to be diagnosed at home or diagnosed in the field.”
Test-kit tradeoffs
Often, there’s a tradeoff with diagnostics, Bauer says.
Over-the-counter tests often detect proteins called antigens that the infecting virus makes. Such antigen tests, which formed the basis of widely used home test kits for COVID-19, are affordable and easy to use at home. But they only detect infections where the viral infection has progressed enough antigen to be detectable.
Earlier diagnosis is possible, including when the infection is just getting started. What’s required for that are molecular tests that detect a DNA or RNA sequence characteristic of the pathogen.
But molecular tests typically rely on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology that requires an expensive laboratory device called a thermocycler that alternately heats and cools the sample being analyzed. Such devices require laboratory skills to use and cost upwards of $1000, which would make the cost prohibitive for most consumers.
To overcome these limitations, Bauer and his colleagues have pursued affordable, accessible, home-based molecular tests for early detection of viral infections. “We went back to the drawing board and found a new set of enzymes,” he says.
The company hit a major milestone in its quest: it created a room-temperature DNA amplification method that does not rely on thermocycling. They tested the method, which they dubbed Annexing Isothermal Nucleotide Amplification (ANINA), to detect a virus that can quickly devastate shrimp in shrimp farms; it accurately detected minute amounts of viral DNA in a 45-minute workflow, and they reported the work in July in Nature Communications.3
“The user feels like they’re using an antigen test, the simple test that we all take at home. The reality is that it’s doing full molecular-based detection that gives its result on what the user knows best—[a paper] strip,” Bauer says.
How fighting viruses could counter AMR
Bauer and his team are also taking a different road to developing therapeutics. “We’ve spent a lot of time developing a therapeutic technology that has broad implications in infectious disease,” Bauer says. “We actually had to go out and ask, is there a better way to treat disease?”
The company uses AI to identify conserved genetic sequences that a pathogen cannot live without, then uses the same targeting mechanism as CRISPR gene therapy, but designed to target and destroy a pathogen’s genetic material while leaving the person’s cells alone. For viral diseases, this knocks down the viral load and gives the immune system a better chance to fight the infection.
By using AI to screen all 25 viral families that infect humans, the company is building a comprehensive atlas of genetic vulnerabilities to more quickly identify viral vulnerabilities when a new viral pathogen appears.
Could the diagnostics and therapeutics platform the company is creating be used to fight antimicrobial resistance? While Seek Labs is not aiming to detect resistant strains of bacteria, fungi or parasites, Bauer thinks their diagnostics and therapeutics could make a difference anyway. It comes back to the patient with a viral respiratory infection who’s demanding something for their illness.
“What causes AMR is that we’re constantly giving drugs. The reason we’re giving drugs is people are going to the doctor’s office, and the doctor can’t get a [diagnostic] result fast enough. The doctor is saying to the patient, I don’t know—I think it’s a virus.”
But with faster, better viral diagnostics, a doctor could prove to the patient that they’re suffering from a viral infection, not a bacterial infection. “We could say to them, factually, this is what you have, and we’re not going to go prescribe you an antibiotic for this.” If the doctor had an effective antiviral therapy, the argument would be even stronger, Bauer says.
And if enough people were dissuaded from taking an antibiotic for a viral infection, it might just make a real dent in AMR.
