Novel, Rapid, Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test for Bloodstream Infections

细菌对我们用来治疗其引起的感染的许多抗生素越来越产生耐药性。这被称为抗菌素耐药性 (AMR)，是世界卫生组织十大全球医疗保健挑战之一 - 它每年直接导致超过 100 万人死亡 - 比艾滋病和疟疾的总和还多 - 并导致数百万人死亡，并使医疗保健系统花费数十亿英镑的治疗费用。由于 20 世纪 80 年代以来没有开发出新的抗生素，情况进一步恶化。造成这一问题的一个重要原因是，目前针对哪种抗生素最适合治疗特定患者的测试（称为抗菌药物敏感性测试 (AST)）需要 2-3 天才能确定细菌对抗生素的耐药性或敏感性。南安普顿大学开发了一种快速测量单个颗粒和细胞特性的新技术，该技术有可能实现更快、更自动化的 AST，在几个小时内从原始样本中得出结果。这项技术被称为阻抗流式细胞术，正在由一家名为 iFAST Diagnostics 的新衍生公司进行商业化，该公司刚刚筹集了 200 万英镑的资金。在与英国健康与安全局 (UKHSA) 的合作中，该技术已被证明适用于尿液样本，这对于疑似尿路感染 (UTI) 的患者非常重要。然而，血流感染 (BSI) 患者的病情往往更为严重，因此，未能及时开出正确抗生素的情况往往比尿路感染严重得多，也是导致这 100 万人死亡的原因。该项目的目的是开发、调整和自动化这项技术，使其能够用于测量从血液样本中提取的细菌，从而展示一种改变游戏规则的抗菌药物敏感性测试，该测试有可能每年挽救数十万人的生命，并缩短住院时间留下来并为全球医疗保健系统节省大量资金。

Bacteria are increasingly becoming resistant to many of the antibiotics that we use to treat infections that they cause. This is known as Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and is one of the WHO's top 10 Global Healthcare Challenges - it directly causes over 1 million deaths per year - more than AIDS and malaria combined - and contributes to many millions more, as well as costing healthcare systems £billions in treatment costs. The situation is further worsened by the fact no new antibiotics have been developed wince the 1980s. A significant contributor to this problem is the fact that current tests for which antibiotic is best to treat a given patient, known as Antimicrobial Susceptibility Tests (ASTs), take 2-3 days to determine the resistance or susceptibility of bacteria to antibiotics.The University of Southampton has developed a novel technique for rapidly measuring the properties of individual particles and cells which has potential for a much faster and more automated AST, giving results within a few hours from a raw sample. This techniques is called Impedance Flow Cytometry and is being commercialised by a new spinout called iFAST Diagnostics, which has just raised £2m of funding.In collaboration with the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA), the technology has been demonstrated to work on urine samples, which is important for patients with suspected Urinary tract Infections (UTIs). However, patients with bloodstream infections (BSIs) are often more sick, and the delays in prescribing the right antibiotic are thus often much more serious than for UTIs and are the cause of the majority of these 1 million deaths.The aim of this project is to develop, adapt and automate this technique to enable it to be used to measure bacteria extracted from blood samples and thus demonstrate a game-changing Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test that has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives per year, as well as to shorten hospital stays and save global healthcare systems a large amount of money.