Novel, Rapid, Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test for Bloodstream Infections

细菌对我们用来治疗它们引起的感染的许多抗生素越来越有抵抗力。这被称为抗菌素耐药性（AMR），是世卫组织十大全球卫生保健挑战之一，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，并使卫生保健系统花费数十亿英镑的治疗费用。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。造成这一问题的一个重要因素是，目前对某一特定患者使用哪种抗生素最好的试验，即抗微生物药物敏感性试验（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品中得出结果。这项技术被称为阻抗流式细胞术（Impedance Flow Cytometry），由一家名为iFAST Diagnostics的新衍生公司商业化，该公司刚刚筹集了200万英镑的资金。在与英国卫生和安全局（UKHSA）的合作下，这项技术已被证明可以在尿液样本上工作，这对疑似尿路感染（uti）的患者很重要。然而，血液感染（bsi）患者往往病情更重，因此在处方正确抗生素方面的延误往往比尿路感染严重得多，是这100万例死亡中的大多数的原因。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，每年有可能挽救数十万人的生命，缩短住院时间，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.