Next-generation Diagnostics for Bacterial Co-infection of COVID-19

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GenomeKey determines how to treat Sepsis in hours, rather than days. This is important because Sepsis now kills more people than cancer, and can kill within hours. For a patient admitted to a hospital today, they would wait 3 days before the doctor knows which antibiotic will fight the infection. GenomeKey reduces this time using cutting edge machine learning and DNA sequencing to bring those 3 days down to just a few hours. This saves lives, saves money, and saves our last antibiotics for when we really need them. This is particularly important in the case of COVID-19 bacterial co-infection. Not only is our target antibiotic susceptibility test cost substantially lower than other approaches, but we also reduce the time taken to determine a negative bacterial sample from 5 days to only hours, enabling the clinician to confidently avoid antibiotics when no bacteria is present. This substantially prevents unnecessary antibiotic usage. This programme addresses the challenge of bacterial co-infection with COVID-19, and the increasing debt of antimicrobial resistance. The overall proportion of COVID-19 patients with respiratory bacterial infection is 7.1% (8.1% for critically ill patients). The majority of patients with COVID-19 received antibiotics (71.3%) even though antibiotics are not effective against viral infections. The use of antibiotics is often prophylactic, which is necessary due to the diagnostic uncertainty with a patient presenting respiratory infection symptoms. However, the rise of antimicrobial resistance among bacterial populations before COVID was a global crisis. Now, with widespread antibiotic overuse during COVID-19, we have increased our AMR debt even further. This presents a looming healthcare crisis once the focus on COVID has subsided where our antibiotics will be increasingly ineffective.