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

每年，在英国，急性肺炎导致50万急诊室就诊。不幸的是，老年人口(65岁)构成了以肺炎为主要诊断的总死亡人数的50%。在急诊科，诊断肺炎的金标准是进行自动胸部X光检查(CXR)，它可以将肺炎与其他呼吸道感染区分开来。一旦将老年患者指定为严重程度较高的患者，老年急性肺炎(GAP)就会得到确认，患者几乎总是按照GAP指南接受广泛的抗生素或抗生素鸡尾酒治疗。从临床医生的角度来看，CXR或CT扫描是确认肺炎诊断的有力工具；但在大多数情况下，它不能确定肺炎的来源。肺炎的来源因当地感染模式的不同而有很大不同。对于医生来说，确定感染源以实施有效的治疗是至关重要的，即病毒感染不能用抗生素治疗，细菌感染不能用抗真菌药物治疗，真菌感染不能用抗病毒药物治疗。目前对病原体身份的诊断测试至少需要1-2天。在急诊室(急诊室)和重症监护病房(ICU)，个人可能在急性耐药感染后4-12小时内死亡。由于诊断结果的周转时间很慢，医生被迫使用经验疗法进行治疗，这往往会导致超出必要范围的抗生素治疗，甚至是错误的抗生素处方。事实上，64.5%的耐药感染患者错误地使用了错误的抗生素，导致住院时间、费用和死亡率显著延长。我们的技术承诺直接从临床样本进行物种鉴定的时间为&lt；30分钟。今天，改变和显著改善患者预后的机会是引入护理点(POC)系统，在该系统中，医生可以直接区分感染是真菌、细菌还是病毒。这将极大地减少护理的经验性，将数百种可用的治疗选择减少到15-20种，并显著增加选择最佳治疗的机会。有了我们的技术，我们将能够更进一步，识别出致病微生物的确切物种。这将进一步将治疗选择从15-20减少到理论上的2-5，完全改变护理的结果。

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.