Fighting antimicrobial resistant infections - A next-generation diagnostic device

GenomeKey正在开发下一代血液细菌感染诊断设备。我们的诊断将导致更早、更准确地发现和诊断细菌性败血症，更快地获得抗菌药物敏感性结果，从而获得更好的治疗和患者预后，并节省大量治疗费用。此外，我们的设备将使临床医生能够更好地管理抗生素的使用，并在医院和社区提供对抗菌素耐药性和病原体菌株的广泛监测，从而实现更好的抗生素管理并限制耐药性的传播。使GenomeKey的方法与其他当代细菌诊断方法不同的是我们的创新技术。目前的黄金标准需要3天以上的时间来治疗一种可以在几小时内致死的疾病。为了克服这个问题，我们正在开发一种快速诊断方法，直接从入侵病原体的基因组中分类物种ID和抗菌药物敏感性，并更快地获得所需的临床信息，将结果的时间从几天减少到6小时。我们的技术直接从患者血液中提取，不需要培养，是一种涵盖所有细菌种类的广泛检测。使用GenomeKey专有的机器学习方法，我们能够比现有的基于目标生物标志物的测试更准确地确定抗生素耐药性。正在开发的医疗诊断设备GenomeKey将是脓毒症临床诊断和治疗的重要一步。快速基因组测序使我们能够绕过对培养的需求，这是当今实践中的基本限制步骤。GenomeKey的诊断是血液培养的替代品，可以在几小时内检测到细菌病原体，而不是几天。该设备将被设计用于医院微生物实验室，使用已经为疑似败血症采取的标准抽血，因此不需要改变现有的诊断管道。为了实现这项资助的目标，我们汇集了一支由专家科学家和工程师组成的团队，并得到了强大的项目和商业管理以及商业经验的支持。此外，我们的外部支持网络是广泛的，包括NHS临床医生和微生物学家，以及学术健康科学网络（AHSN）。通过这笔拨款，我们将利用以前资助的研发成果，组装一个原型设备，以展示我们的方法的临床疗效和影响，为我们扩大生产和临床试验做好准备。

GenomeKey is developing a next-generation diagnostic device for bacterial blood infections. Our diagnostic will result in earlier and more accurate detection and diagnosis of bacterial sepsis, and faster antimicrobial susceptibility results, leading to better treatment, patient outcomes and considerable treatment cost savings. In addition, our device will allow clinicians to better manage use of antibiotics and provide broad surveillance of antimicrobial resistance and pathogen strains in hospitals and communities, thereby enabling better antibiotic stewardship and limiting the spread of resistance.What sets GenomeKey's approach apart from other contemporary approaches to bacterial diagnosis is our innovative technology. The current gold standard takes upwards of 3 days for a condition that can kill in hours. To overcome this we are developing a rapid diagnostic which classifies species ID and antimicrobial susceptibility directly from the genome of the invading pathogen and arrives at the desired clinical information much faster, reducing the time to result from days to only six hours. Our technology works directly from patient blood, with no culturing required, and is a broad assay covering all species of bacteria. With GenomeKey's proprietary machine learning approach we are able to determine the antibiotic resistance to a greater accuracy than existing tests which are based on a target panel of biomarkers.The medical diagnostic device GenomeKey is developing will be a significant step forward for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of sepsis. Rapid genomic sequencing enables us to bypass the need for culturing which is the fundamental limiting step in today's practice. GenomeKey's diagnostic is a replacement for blood culture and will detect the bacterial pathogens within hours, rather than days. This device will be designed for use within hospital microbiology labs, using the standard blood draw already taken for suspected sepsis, thus requiring no change to the existing diagnostic pipeline. To achieve the objectives of this grant we have brought together a team of expert scientists and engineers, supported by strong project and business management and commercial experience. Moreover, our external support network is expansive, including NHS clinicians and microbiologists, and the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSN). Through this grant, we will take the outputs of previously funded R&D and assemble a prototype device to demonstrate the clinical efficacy and impact of our approach, preparing us for scaled up manufacturing and clinical trials.