Point-of-care infection identification system in 30 minutes - tackling acute pneumonia in emergency rooms and intensive care units

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Every single year, acute pneumonia is responsible for 500,000 ER visits in the UK. Sadly, the elder demographic (\\\> 65 years old) constitutes > 50% of the total deaths with pneumonia as the primary diagnosis. In an emergency department, the gold standard for diagnosing pneumonia is to perform an automated chest radiograph (CXR) which can distinguish pneumonia from other respiratory tract infections. Upon assigning an elder patient with a high severity score, geriatric acute pneumonia (GAP) is confirmed and the patient is almost always administered broad-based antibiotics or an antibiotic cocktail in line with the GAP guidelines.From the point of view of a clinician, CXR or CT scans are powerful tools that confirm the diagnosis of pneumonia; however, it does not identify the source of pneumonia in most circumstances. The source of pneumonia vary wildly depending on the local infection pattern. It is crucial for physicians to determine the source of infection to administer the effective treatment, i.e., viral infections cannot be treated with antibiotics, bacterial infections cannot be treated with antifungal drugs, and fungal infections cannot be treated with anti-viral drugs.Current diagnostic tests for a pathogen's identity take at least 1 - 2 days. In emergency rooms (ERs) and intensive care units (ICUs), individuals can die within 4 - 12 hours of an acute resistant infection. With the slow turnaround time for diagnostic results, doctors are forced to treat with empirical therapy, which often leads to broader than necessary antibiotic therapy or even an incorrect antibiotic being prescribed. In fact, 64.5% of patients with resistant infections are incorrectly administered the wrong antibiotics resulting in a significantly longer length of stay, cost, and death rate.Our technology promises a time-to-result of <30 minutes for species identification directly from a clinical sample. The opportunity to disrupt and significantly improve patient outcomes today is to introduce a point-of-care (POC) system where the doctor can directly differentiate whether the infection is fungal, bacterial, or viral. This would dramatically reduce the empirical nature of care, cutting down hundreds of available treatment options to 15 - 20 options and significantly increasing the chance of selecting the optimal treatment. With our technology, we will be able to go a big step further and identify the exact species of the disease-causing microbe. This would further reduce the treatment options from 15 - 20 to theoretically 2 - 5, completely transforming the outcome of care.