Publicador de continguts

BLDetecTool

Foto: Image: Drew Hays / Unsplash
Data
11/07/2018
Hora
10.00 h
Lloc
Room 14, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (Campus Clínic, UB)
(Casanova, 143) Barcelona
Ponent
Hervé Boutal (ISGlobal)

For the first time, a new detection system will allow for a fast detection of β-lactamases in clinical samples and Hervé Boutal, Postdoctoral Student at ISGlobal, will offer an open seminar on this issue, on 11 June.

A New Diagnostic Tool to Combat the Antimicrobial Resistance

The detection system corresponds to a strip, which allows the immunological detection, enclosed in a plastic device, which carries out sample treatment in a very simple way (filtration, concentration, extraction, incubation) and deposits it onto the strip. The concept of the device and the different steps involved in the test are being evaluated in different media (urine, blood), with different bacteria. At this stage of the project the devices, produced by 3D printing, are ready to be optimized and validated with real clinical samples (blood, urine and rectal swab). In order to achieve its objectives, the operational procedures will be improved to fit with clinical habits and analytical specifications (specificity, reproducibility and sensitivity). At one point, the procedures and the detection system should be perfectly adapted to the hospital practices.

Antimicrobial resistance causes 25,000 deaths in the EU per year. The extra costs associated with the treatment of these infections are estimated at 1,500 million euros, only in Europe. The increase in the number of infections caused by extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL) and the emergence of carbapenemases-producing Enterobacteriaceae represent an immediate public health threat that requires urgent actions.

Normally, the traditional bacterial culture techniques require between 16 and 32 hours to isolate and identify the pathogenic organism as well as the resistant determinants. In contrast, real-time detection would permit adapting immediately the treatment to the bacteria concerned. This would not only result in better treatment, but also in the reduction of unnecessary use of wide-spectrum antibiotics that promote resistance. Molecular biology tools are rapid but quite expensive. New, rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic tools to detect ESBL and carbapenemases are urgently needed.

Some of those tools have recently been developed and validated using monoclonal antibody-based methods such as Lateral Flow ImmunoAssays (strip). Although such assays allow a consequent time-to-results improvement compared to molecular or phenotypic methods for example, so far they are implemented after an isolation step of the bacterial strains on agar media.

Hervé Boutal

He is Postdoctoral Student at ISGlobal and his current project is 'Antimicrobial resistance detection'. Hervé Boutal does research in Cell Biology, Virology and Microbiology and is currently working in LAMP evaluation for pathogens detection and antimicrobial susceptibility testing with pulmonary samples.