Rapid new methods for sepsis diagnosis
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Rapid new methods for sepsis diagnosis
IRAS ID
282085
Contact name
Michael E Murphy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Sepsis is a life-threatening consequence of infection that kills 3,500 people every year in Scotland.
Due to the high risk of death, multiple broad-spectrum antibiotics are routinely used in patients with sepsis, which contributes to the development and spread of antibiotic resistance. Current methods to identify the underlying infection and target treatment require growth tests, which take several days to establish a positive result.
Rapid diagnosis of the infecting bacteria would enable the use of the right antibiotics straight away, reducing the risk of complications for the individual patient, and benefiting society by reducing use of last-resort broad-spectrum drugs.
This project aims to tackle the challenge of rapid diagnosis by two methods. The first will engineer a miniaturised, portable platform that will isolate bacteria from clinical samples within minutes, without prior knowledge of their identity or growth tests. Importantly, this approach will be coupled to technologies already available in hospitals to perform bacterial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing in a much-reduced timeframe. The second will exploit clinical metagenomics to identify bacteria and genomic determinants of antimicrobial resistance direct from patient samples.
We aim to use anonymised surplus samples from patient with suspected sepsis. Samples will be processed using different techniques designed to optimally separate out bacteria. The bacteria will be identified using the MALDI-TOF machine which is part of current routine practice in microbiology, or through analysis of pathogen sequence data.
REC name
London - Surrey Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/HRA/2280
Date of REC Opinion
17 Jun 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion