Unmet need
Urinary tract infection (UTI) is one of the most common infectious diseases in the world, affecting 50-60% of women at least once in their lifetime. In the United States, UTIs account for over 2 million emergency department visits and approximately $3.5 billion in healthcare costs annually. Unfortunately, UTI resistance to first line antibiotics is also growing. In order to promote antibiotic stewardship and reduce healthcare costs associated with UTIs, healthcare providers need definitive and clinically actionable diagnoses for UTIs, including both pathogen identification (ID) and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST). Current bacterial pathogen ID/AST technologies rely on traditional culture-based methods and thus require several days to complete. Consequently, UTIs are often empirically treated at outpatient clinics with first-line, broad-spectrum oral antibiotics. There is an urgent need to expedite bacterial pathogen ID/AST.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a new approach for rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases based on microfluidic droplet-based single-cell measurements of bacterial 16S rRNA. This approach provides the foundation to achieve both pathogen ID and AST from clinical samples at significantly shortened timescales, within as little as thirty-minutes.
Stage of Development
The researchers have shown proof of principle for their accelerated bacterial pathogen ID/AST technology. The technology is capable of classifying up to nine unique uropathogenic species into appropriate phylogenetic categories with a sensitivity and specificity that is comparable to what is standard within the field. In addition to bacterial classification, this strategy is capable of assessing the antimicrobial susceptibility of pathogens with antibiotic exposure durations as low as ten-minutes for three commonly administered antibiotics with distinct mechanisms (i.e., gentamicin, ciprofloxacin, and ampicillin), making it one of the fastest combined ID/AST platform to date.
