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

GenomeKey决定如何在几小时内治疗败血症，而不是几天。这一点很重要，因为败血症现在杀死的人比癌症还多，而且可以在几小时内致死。对于今天住院的病人来说，他们要等3天医生才能知道哪种抗生素可以对抗感染。GenomeKey使用尖端的机器学习和DNA测序技术将这3天缩短到几个小时，从而缩短了这段时间。这可以挽救生命，节省金钱，并在我们真正需要抗生素的时候保留我们最后的抗生素。这在COVID-19细菌合并感染的情况下尤为重要。我们的目标抗生素敏感性测试成本大大低于其他方法，而且我们还将确定阴性细菌样本所需的时间从5天减少到仅几个小时，使临床医生能够在没有细菌存在的情况下自信地避免使用抗生素。这大大防止了不必要的抗生素使用。该规划旨在应对细菌与COVID-19合并感染的挑战，以及日益严重的抗微生物药物耐药性问题。新冠肺炎患者合并呼吸道细菌感染的总体比例为7.1%（重症患者为8.1%）。尽管抗生素对病毒感染无效，但大多数COVID-19患者（71.3%）接受了抗生素治疗。抗生素的使用通常是预防性的，由于出现呼吸道感染症状的患者诊断不确定，这是必要的。然而，在COVID之前，细菌种群抗菌素耐药性的上升是一场全球危机。现在，随着COVID-19期间抗生素的广泛过度使用，我们进一步增加了抗菌素耐药性债务。一旦对COVID的关注平息，我们的抗生素将越来越无效，这就意味着一场迫在眉睫的医疗危机。

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.