Table 1.

Conceptual differences in medical procedures between conventional versus synthetic biology enabled diagnostics

	Conventional diagnostics	Synthetic biology enabled diagnostics
Diagnostic procedure	Centralized clinical biochemistry laboratory, high resource requirements	Ambulatory, close to patient, potentially in vivo, low resource, delocalized
Sample management	Pre‐treatment, large volumes	Raw, small volumes
Nature of biomarkers	Parallelized, static, disconnected from patient pathophysiology	Multiplexed, dynamic, in situ, close to patient pathophysiology
Data transmission	Delayed, complex interfaces	Real‐time, integrated signal processing, local/remote readout
Link to therapy	Delayed, through physician evaluation	Direct, in situ, through programmable decision algorithms: remote supervision
Data management	Files, registries	Embedded memory
Medical benefit	Robustness, gold standard	Patient comfort/care, personalized solutions, patient commitment
Development	High cost and lengthy	Short and low‐cost design to production