Comparison of Anti-microbial Resistance Detection

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Evaluation of direct inoculation of the BD Phoenix AST system from positive BACTEC blood cultures for the determination of same day antimicrobial resistance detection in comparison to EUCAST disc diffusion method

  • IRAS ID

    254139

  • Contact name

    James Greig

  • Contact email

    jamesgreig@nhs.net

  • Sponsor organisation

    University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    0 years, 5 months, 30 days

  • Research summary

    Blood culture samples are taken from patients to determine if they have a blood stream infection and is one of the samples taken from patients presenting with sepsis. The most common cause of such infections are due to bacteria. If bacteria are detected in these samples antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is performed to determine what antibiotics can be used to treat the infection successfully. Currently this method is performed using a technique called disc diffusion which takes 24 hours to determine which antibiotics will work. This study is looking at two new methods which could potentially give results in as short a time frame as 4 hours, hence allowing the correct treatment of the patient to be given on the same day rather than 24 hours later if the methods prove successful.

    The two new methods involve extracting bacteria from excess blood culture samples and inoculating AST panels and loading these onto an automated instrument called the BD Phoenix which reads the panels and can produce results from as soon as 6 hours after being loaded. The second method uses the same disc diffusion method that the laboratory currently uses but with shortened incubation times to produce results. The study will test 100 in parallel in one microbiology laboratory.

    The two methods will be trialed alongside anonymised excess blood culture samples and the results will be compared to see if the trial methods produce the same results as the current method. If the two trial method results are accurate i.e. produce the same result for each antibiotic tested then there is potential to implement this method. This would allow the antibiotic treatment options for patients to be available the same day that their sample was confirmed to contain bacteria and allow the correct treatment to be started earlier than currently.

  • REC name

    South West - Frenchay Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    18/SW/0261

  • Date of REC Opinion

    20 Nov 2018

  • REC opinion

    Favourable Opinion