Dear everyone,

 

I am new to the forum, I am a life scientist and I am eager to ask you a question.

 

In our lab I am currently working on a new technology capable of assessing the viability to bacteria (or other type of cells) in real time with only few bacteria. In the contrary, current technics require growth of culture and time to asses the antibiotics.

 

I am thinking that it would be a potential application for antibiotics testing. Take a little sample (say from the patient) of bacteria, and the machine would tell you what are the best antibiotics against this bacteria.

 

This technology would give you an immediate answer for the most efficient antibiotic treatment for your patient.

 

Do you think that such a product would be useful in clinical setting?

 

Thank you for your feedback.

These assays are useful and I know of a number of approaches that try to automate this. For the clinical settings a number of aspects are relevant. It requires to have a readout that is easy to interpret for non-microbiologists, it has to be accurate and reproducible and the workflow must be fairly straightforward with little room for mistakes.

Usually the new approaches tend to be a bit rough on the last part.

Fundamentally there is the issue that during an infection smears can have a mix of bacteria with different resistance profiles, therefore the workflow ideally should also answer what bacteria there are so that the most pathogenic ones can be targeted first (though usually abundance itself is also a fair indicator).

Can you describe the technology?