Faculty News
"Rapid Identification and Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing of Bacteria"
Alan Hunt, PhD; Duane Newton, PhD; Brandon McNaughton, PhD; Roy Clark, PhD; Raoul Kopelman, PhD; and Ran An, PhD
2008 funding: $100,000
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has characterized the rising resistance of bacteria to antibiotics as "One of the world's most pressing health problems." Bacterial infections cause 90,000 deaths per year in the U.S. while increased antimicrobial resistance is a pervasive problem that has spanned decades and many bacterial strains. The most effective way to prevent antimicrobial resistance from developing is accurate diagnosis and treatment of the specific pathogen responsible for an infection. Currently clinical antibiotic susceptibility tests require a total test time of 2-4 days. The current standard of care drives doctors to prescribe and administer broad spectrum antibiotics and ultimately increase the potential for antibiotic resistance. A ground-breaking approach being developed by University of Michigan researchers is to develop a faster diagnostic test, hours instead of days, to significantly reduce inappropriate antimicrobial therapy. The team led by BME faculty, Alan Hunt, is fine-tuning an instrument that can perform identification and rapid antimicrobial resistance measurements on the time-scale of hours, substantially outperforming existing diagnostics.
Using grant money received from the UM Coulter Translational Research Program the team plans to develop and clinically validate a micro-fabricated fluidic chip that will interface to an already developed stand-alone prototype device with the capability to rapidly identify bacterial strains and determine their susceptibility to antimicrobials. During the upcoming year they hope to develop and clinically validate a proof-of-principal prototype instrument based on magnetic nonlinear oscillators that can rapidly detect bacterial cells in vitro, and monitor responses to chemical agents. This will advance their long term goal as well as their short term goal (2-3 years) to develop a clinical diagnostic instrument that can detect and quantify bacteria at concentrations found in a clinical "broth culture" after ~12 hrs. Such an instrument will have a significant clinical impact, both in the identification of bacterial strains and in susceptibility tests.
The development of new antibiotics provides one avenue to address resistance, but alone this has proven to be a partial and temporary remedy in the ongoing battle against increased antimicrobial resistance. Instead, both new antimicrobials and technologies that will allow physicians to quickly determine appropriate antimicrobial therapy need to be developed. With current clinical instruments requiring several days to obtain results, there is a clear need to develop rapid means of identifying bacteria and determining their respective susceptibility to antibiotics, on the time-scale of hours rather than days. Fast methods for identifying antibiotic susceptibility are thus needed both to improve the efficacy of therapy, and to impede the severe health problems caused by rising bacterial resistance.
A list of all the U-M Coulter funded projects is found on the UM BME Coulter Site.
Posted on August 19, 2008, 2:42 pm