Novel, Rapid, Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test for Bloodstream Infections

细菌对我们用来治疗他们引起的感染的许多抗生素越来越产生抗药性。这被称为抗菌素耐药性(AMR)，是世卫组织全球十大医疗挑战之一-它每年直接导致100多万人死亡-超过艾滋病和疟疾的总和-并导致数百万人死亡，以及医疗系统花费数十亿GB的治疗成本。自20世纪80年代以来，没有开发出新的抗生素，这一事实使情况进一步恶化。这个问题的一个重要原因是，目前被称为抗菌素敏感性测试(AST)的抗生素最适合治疗给定患者的测试，需要2-3天来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新的技术，可以快速测量单个颗粒和细胞的属性，这可能会使AST速度更快、自动化程度更高，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，正在由一种名为iFAST诊断的新衍生产品商业化，该公司刚刚筹集了200万GB的资金。与英国卫生和安全局(UKHSA)合作，这项技术已经被证明可以用于尿样，这对疑似尿路感染(UTIs)的患者来说很重要。然而，血液感染(BSI)患者的病情往往更严重，因此在开出正确的抗生素方面的延误往往比UTI严重得多，也是这100万人死亡中大多数人死亡的原因。该项目的目标是开发、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生素敏感性测试，它有可能每年挽救数十万人的生命，并缩短住院时间，为全球医疗体系节省大量资金。

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.