Agenda

Join us as we open the conference with a karakia and warm welcome, acknowledging those gathered and setting the tone for the day ahead. This session will also cover important housekeeping information ensuring everyone is informed and ready for an engaging and successful Co:Lab 2026.

Drawing on her personal experience of breast cancer and her work across research, genomics and consumer advocacy Fay will draw on her understanding of the health ecosystem to discuss: the need for nationally coordinated and equitable access to genomic testing, interpretation, treatment, clinical trials, and evidence. The importance of connection across laboratories, clinicians, researchers, health services, industry, consumers and other stakeholders. The session will highlight the importance of collaboration to build on and complement existing capability and help ensure advances in genomic medicine benefit all New Zealanders, regardless of who they are or where they live. 

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Discussion of AI in pathology tends to focus on expensive infrastructure — digital scanners and image-analysis algorithms — or on whether AI will replace us. This session looks in the other direction: a show-and-tell tour of general-purpose AI tools that most of us already have access to, and that every member of the laboratory team can start using immediately — pathologists, scientific and technical staff, and administrators alike.

Drawing on real examples from a large public anatomic pathology laboratory, Serena demonstrates how these everyday tools can take on the repetitive, manual work that eats up the day: drafting and summarising email correspondence, particularly the tricky ones that need careful wording; building and reformatting competency and training frameworks; enriching grossing protocols with educational background; and turning free-text dictation into consistent, structured wording suited to a pathology report. Throughout, she sets out a simple responsible-use framework for capturing the productivity benefits while keeping patient data safe and staying within organisational policy.

The aim is not to turn anyone into an AI developer, but to lower the barrier to getting started — so everyone leaves with at least one tool they can use the next working day.

Artificial intelligence in anatomic pathology is rapidly evolving from narrow diagnostic tools toward comprehensive models capable of supporting diagnosis, predicting therapeutic response, and estimating patient prognosis. This presentation will review the current state of AI in pathology, highlighting the transition from traditional single-task convolutional neural network (CNN) models to emerging foundation models trained on vast collections of digital pathology images and multimodal clinical data.

An update on HealthX's journey and looking forward at emerging priorities, and the innovations driving change across the health sector. Sonny will share insights into what lies ahead and how leaders can help enable research, digital capability and new models of care.

This presentation will bring home the human impact of sepsis and why microbiology plays such a critical role. Moving beyond the lab bench, it shares powerful patient and whānau stories that sit behind every blood culture and test result, highlighting how quickly lives can change, and what’s at stake when sepsis is missed or delayed. It will connect these lived experiences with the critical role microbiology plays in early detection, timely treatment, and system improvement, challenging us to see the person behind the specimen and the opportunity to save lives through faster recognition and action.

Healthcare facilities, including hospitals and long-term care facilities (LTCFs), are high-risk environments for the transmission of bacterial pathogens between patients and residents. Conventional identification of transmission events often depends on recognising clusters of cases occurring within the same time and location. Consequently, sporadic cases or cases arising across different locations may remain undetected.

Bacterial whole-genome sequencing (WGS) enables assessment of the phylogenetic relatedness of isolates and can identify potential transmission events that are not apparent through routine epidemiological surveillance. To support outbreak investigations and detect cryptic transmission of antimicrobial-resistant organisms, routine WGS of WHO critical priority antimicrobial resistant bacterial pathogens was introduced into the diagnostic laboratory. Sequencing was performed using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION platform, with bioinformatic analysis conducted on a Galaxy server. This approach confirmed transmission within recognised case clusters and identified multiple previously unrecognised outbreaks on hospital wards and in LTCFs. Several of these transmission events were associated with significant clinical harm. Detection of cryptic outbreaks enabled targeted infection prevention and control interventions to interrupt ongoing transmission and protect patients and residents. These findings demonstrate that routine bacterial WGS using the MinION platform is feasible within a diagnostic laboratory. It can both confirm transmission within recognised clusters and identify otherwise undetected transmission of priority pathogens, providing actionable information to support infection prevention and control.

Emerging diagnostics are transforming our ability to detect disease earlier than ever before. But if diagnosis is only the beginning of a patient's journey, what should come next?

Using endometriosis as a case study, Juliet Oliver explores how pathology could become a far more active partner in chronic disease management by connecting diagnosis with biological context, personalised self management and longitudinal patient insights.

• Networking drinks from 5:00pm in the Cable room - brought to you by Mediscope
• Dinner from 6:30pm in the Te Aro room - brought to you by Diagnostica Stago