The award provides funding to support researchers in their quest to create a microchip-sized device
A University of Strathclyde project that aims to reduce antibiotic resistance has received a Longitude Prize Discovery Award.
The award provides funding to support researchers in their quest to create a microchip-sized device that can quickly tell doctors the correct antibiotic to prescribe. Time pressures on doctors and a lack of rapid diagnostic tests mean a high proportion of antibiotics are currently prescribed speculatively increasing the risk of resistance.
According to the World Health Organisation, a growing number of infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and gonorrhoea are becoming hard to treat as antibiotics become less effective. The device being developed by the Strathclyde team – called the Microplate – will identify a bacteria’s vulnerability to a range of antibiotics using highly-sensitive electrical measurements.
The goal of the project is to shrink the existing processes of bacterial culture onto a ‘lab-on-a-chip’ to provide GPs, hospital doctors and nurses with instant access to rapid testing for infectious disease.
Normally, samples are sent away to a hospital laboratory for culture and this process can take 12-72 hours to provide a result. Technological advances mean there is now strong interest in developing alternatives to traditional approaches.
The challenges associated with producing a miniaturised test include: achieving high sensitivity for the bacteria of interest, obtaining a fast time to result, designing a simple-to-operate test and designing a technology which is cheap and suitable for mass manufacture.
The research team, comprising Dr Damion Corrigan, Dr Paul Hoskisson, Prof Will Shu and Dr Dave Alcon (Royal Alexandria Hospital Paisley), are using cutting edge advances in microfabrication, microbiology and biological/chemical printing to overcome these difficulties.
Dr Corrigan said,“It is our aim to engineer and test a microchip sized device which very quickly tells a doctor the correct antibiotic to prescribe by rapidly identifying the susceptibility profile of the pathogen allowing prescription of the right drug.
“The goal is to reduce the amount of time currently required to establish antimicrobial susceptibility profiles for bacterial infections, thereby improving antibiotic stewardship. Currently antibiotics are prescribed speculatively in many cases leading to emergence of resistance.”
“We would like to envisage a scenario where ultimately all patients are tested and given the appropriate antibiotic for their infection on the same day as their visit to the doctor.”
The Discovery Awards is a seed funding programme to help teams competing to win the Longitude Prize. Funding for the 2017 Discovery Awards draws on a grant of £250,000 from MSD, a global healthcare company.
The Longitude Prize is an international competition with a £10 million prize fund to create an affordable, rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic test for bacterial infections. It is being run by innovation foundation Nesta and supported by Innovate UK as funding partner.
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